The biggest names in and out of Hollywood are choosing to be interviewed by their peers rather than journalists, leaving many more revealing questions on the table
We live in a time where ultra-rich businesspeople have accrued more wealth and power than ever, creating a growing sentiment that they ought to be held to account, no doubt exacerbated by the fact that a wealthy businessman is in his second self-enriching term in the US presidency. So naturally, CNN, Donald Trump’s supposed nemesis, has figured out the best way to use their resources to better interrogate this elevated class: by letting them interview each other about their businesses. The 1 on 1 is named not for an actual journalist going up against a major business leader; they would probably never agree to that. So instead, CEOs can “grill” each other about whatever they mutually agree are the correct things to ask fellow elites. A spokesperson says these conversations will be “refreshingly direct”. Refreshing to who, exactly, is not specified, but you can take a guess.
This is disappointing but also inevitable. Interviews, especially on-camera interviews with people not directly involved with politics, have increasingly become all-subject, no-perspective affairs, starting from the ground zero of the entertainment industry – a leader in content-light mutual admiration. For a splashy new Vogue piece, for example, the journalist whose byline is affixed to a conversation featuring Meryl Streep and Anna Wintour, tied to the release of The Devil Wears Prada 2, takes the fly-on-the-wall version of journalism to an extreme: the “moderator” of this conversation is Greta Gerwig, Streep and Wintour’s fellow celeb. Chloe Malle, the writer and Wintour’s successor as Vogue editor, meanwhile, compares herself to a “court stenographer” without mentioning that in courts, typically the lawyers and judge aren’t all on the same team. There’s no byline at all on the introduction to another recent piece where Marc Jacobs – finally, a leg up for this underappreciated figure! – interviews Sabrina Carpenter. Presumably someone else was actually in the room with them – unless Jacobs brought his own recorder, did his own transcriptions and anonymously wrote that intro. Journalists, apparently, should be neither particularly seen nor heard.
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