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.
This approach isn’t new to the 2020s. For years, Interview magazine thrived (or at least existed) based on the idea that it might be more fun to pair up celebrities for a friendly chat, rather than hire an actual experienced interviewer to grill one or the other. And they weren’t entirely wrong! Of course there’s something tantalizing about the second (or in the Vogue case, third) person in the article or on the video also boasting a marquee name. It can feel like two interviews for the price of one. Plenty of film fans look forward to Variety’s annual Actors on Actors series, where, say, Adam Sandler chats with Ariana Grande, Leonardo DiCaprio mixes it up with Jennifer Lawrence, or Sydney Sweeney talks craft with Ethan Hawke. The pairings are often inspired and the clips go understandably viral.
But watching the whole interview often leaves the viewer undernourished. Sandler, for example, is notoriously press-shy, and once the charm of him trading anecdotes with Grande subsides, you realize that their interview is largely a series of compliment trades. Actors can be insightful about their craft, but they’re not all trained in the art of, say, asking follow-up questions. They’re also happy to leave whatever discomfiting subjects off-limits for their friends and peers. It’s almost a step beyond the canned, pre-approved questions that haunt some actual superstar interviews. Celebrities can talk to each other knowing that they won’t even have the momentary secondhand discomfort of their publicist needing to tell Kate Hudson what’s off-limits. She knows. She’s a celebrity, too. She gets it.
This trend has plenty of antecedents; unsurprisingly, most of them once felt refreshing. It’s easy now to dismiss the insistently playful and substance-free gameshow vibes of Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show. But after years of musty Jay Leno shtick, the idea that Fallon would coax his guests into shows of good-sport faith like dumb sketches or intentionally silly competitions was initially quite appealing; it’s not as if talkshow conversations were all that revealing anyway. Years later, however, with the genuine prickliness of David Letterman long off the air, his successor Stephen Colbert (the best current late-night chatshow interviewer) about to follow, suddenly there’s not much by way of contrast. Similarly, Amy Poehler’s popular Good Hang podcast is awfully appealing, given that it often involves Poehler talking casually (and seemingly openly) with a variety of celebrity friends and acquaintances. It’s also a kind of simulated, low-risk intimacy that skews highly affirming.
It’s probably not a coincidence that Fallon and Poehler both got their big breaks on Saturday Night Live; chumminess disguised as spontaneity is a big part of late-night programming. As a culture, we love to see celebrities put themselves out there as SNL hosts, even though of course the show is designed to make its guests look good. Now, cast members of that show also appear in interviewer-free promotional videos where they goof around playing Fallon-style quiz games or cooking competitions – and if something a little out of sorts does slip through, it becomes a mini-scandal.
That’s the other obvious drawback to submitting to a real interviewer: so many cultural figures are so insulated that anyone who does say something more spontaneous immediately stands out – often as the target of online ire. Jack White had to release a statement re-explaining himself because an observation he made to the Guardian regarding his own musical process was perceived as slagging off Taylor Swift. (It’s exceedingly easy to picture the celeb-on-celeb version of that interview that would have steered the conversation away from White’s point and towards making sure that Swift was appropriately praised.) No wonder plenty of those in a similar position would prefer a friendlier set-up that also doesn’t carry the baggage of being tagged as press-avoidant.
Of course, complaining about celeb-on-celeb interviews as a writer creates a weird dynamic, too; it sounds like whining over being exiled from the cool-kid table. And there are, frankly, plenty of quasi-interviewers who make the oops-all-celebs approach seem like a smart one; red-carpet events and junkets are now lousy with underqualified influencers asking inane, sometimes genuinely ill-informed questions. By comparison, yes, Sandler and Grande are masterly interviewers. For that matter, this culture writer wouldn’t describe himself as a master of the form; interviewing people is much harder than writing essays or reviews. It takes a lot of preparation and, scarier, practice, which can sometimes take the accidental form of, say, justified fretting that the guy from one of your favorite bands thinks you’re an idiot. That’s exactly why people who are genuinely good at it should be protected.
Ultimately, it’s not of great importance whether or not an actor or musician can be coaxed into saying something genuinely interesting by a professional interviewer. But this insider approach has started to bleed into the art itself, not just the conversation surrounding it. Increasingly, most pop-musician biopics are produced in highly controlled environments where actors such as Colman Domingo or Miles Teller play ball with the Michael Jackson estate as a matter of course. A gifted and brilliant film-maker like Sofia Coppola will make her first documentary where the subject is … her friend Marc Jacobs. Moreover, when this obsequiousness invades areas that affect more people’s lives, like CEOs who employ thousands of people, the kid-gloves treatment suddenly looks like a vastly worse trade-off for access. (At least when two actors glad-hand each other for 25 minutes, there’s often a basic level of on-camera charisma that a couple of CEOs cannot guarantee.) By definition, the rich and powerful will always receive preferential treatment from someone. But the media doesn’t have to provide the furnishings – and the public shouldn’t have to be told that it’s any kind of journalism.