A Rarity in News
Image Source: Chris Wallace meets President Donald Trump, Getty Images
Vladimir Putin decided to do a sit-down interview with Chris Wallace following the Helsinki Summit this week. As Wallace is an American journalist and not Russian, Putin most certainly did some prep work for that interview. As such, Vlad and his staff surely tried to anticipate any and all types of questions that Wallace might ask. That said, even if Putin has a staff full of psychics not one of them would have warned him that he might be asked the following:
“Why is it that so many of the people who oppose Vladimir Putin end up dead, or close to it?”
Wow. That’s the kind of question people JOKE about asking, but they don’t actually ask it! I’m willing to bet that in his forty years of interviewing people, Chris Wallace has never before asked that question of anyone. What’s more is that by the time he asked it, Putin had already shown that he was agitated with Wallace, and Wallace acknowledged that he was running short on time and would bypass some other questions. In other words, he prioritized that question, even though he had every reason to believe Vlad wasn’t in the mood. That is called JOURNALISM.
Look, this is 2018. Every day we get bombarded with Fake News. Some is legitimately fake, some is spun as fake, and some is just told in real time and turns out later to have changed. But we see and hear FAKE NEWS every single day. What we don’t get every day in 2018 is REAL JOURNALISM. But rare as it is, it does exist, and if you look hard enough long enough, you might occasionally get a glimpse of it. Chris Wallace gave you that glimpse this week, and it was great.
That said, I must wonder if Chris will be looking suspiciously at his breakfast cereal for the next couple of weeks, if you follow me…
More wisdom next week.