<\/p>\n
W<\/span>e 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, celebrity.land, Donald Trump<\/a>\u2019s supposed nemesis, has figured out the best way to use their resources to better interrogate this elevated class: by letting them interview each other<\/a> 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 \u201cgrill\u201d each other about whatever they mutually agree are the correct things to ask fellow elites. A spokesperson says these conversations will be \u201crefreshingly direct\u201d. Refreshing to who, exactly, is not specified, but you can take a guess.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 a leader in content-light mutual admiration. For a splashy new Vogue piece<\/a>, 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<\/a>, takes the fly-on-the-wall version of journalism to an extreme: the \u201cmoderator\u201d of this conversation is Greta Gerwig, Streep and Wintour\u2019s fellow celeb. Chloe Malle, the writer and Wintour\u2019s successor as Vogue editor, meanwhile, compares herself to a \u201ccourt stenographer\u201d without mentioning that in courts, typically the lawyers and judge aren\u2019t all on the same team. There\u2019s no byline at all on the introduction to another recent piece where Marc Jacobs \u2013 finally, a leg up for this underappreciated figure! \u2013 interviews Sabrina Carpenter<\/a>. Presumably someone else was actually in the room with them \u2013 unless Jacobs brought his own recorder, did his own transcriptions and anonymously wrote that intro. Journalists, apparently, should be neither particularly seen nor heard.<\/p>\n This approach isn\u2019t 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\u2019t entirely wrong! Of course there\u2019s 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\u2019s annual Actors on Actors<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n