What does Charlie Rose think of us?

By the New York Bureau Chief

Among the ranks of professional interviewers, Charlie—or CR, as your correspondents like to call him—has earned television’s most resolutely loyal viewers while rarely, if ever, acknowledging their presence. Jon Stewart takes down the likes of Jim Cramer while hamming it up for a studio full of fans; Larry King looks into the camera often, desperately seeking our approval; Charlie doesn’t even gives us a wink. His is the most naturalistic of performances—there’s no sign of self-consciousness, down to his perpetually unlinked cuffs (a habit he claims is a matter of hasty dressing rather than deliberate style), and the fourth wall remains intact. It’s almost as if he’s unaware that he’s being watched, ignorant to the fact that his conversations are being broadcast on television^*.

Modern TV is all about shouting, laughing, and crying at the viewer, so how can Charlie pull off such detachment? Who exactly does he think wants to watch him not perform? Since Charlie rarely talks to the audience, we have only scant clues. There was his recent interview with Simon Rattle, in which he opened with “Sir Simon Rattle is here. He is, as you know, the artistic director and chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic.” As we know? Really? Granted Charlie is flattering Rattle (who wouldn’t know such an august figure as you, Simon?), but in an era when classical music is very far removed from mainstream culture, how many people in Charlie’s highly educated, public-television-tote-bag–wielding audience really know off the top of their heads who Simon Rattle is? Many, I suspect; but I also suspect “many” makes up less than half the viewership.

Charlie doesn’t want to hear it. Charlie’s audience—if not the audience that watches Charlie Rose—knows Simon Rattle. It’s a mythical group rendered with rose-tinged nostalgia (pun intended) for a sort of 1950s bourgeois middlebrow, and you can see its impact all over “the broadcast.” Charlie books few genuinely pop-culture figures—the Jay-Z interview being a notable exception—and his guests skew older and very white. And then there’s his treatment of politicians and businessmen, whom Rose fetes as public servants and captains of industry when much of the country regards them as the worst kind of thieves, pirates, and hucksters.

More than that, Charlie wants us to know that these bigwigs are his friends. Charlie loves to let drop that he and Morgan Stanley chairman John Mack had dinner the other night; or that he’s buddies with Steve Rattner; or that every year, he sings carols at Simpson Thacher head Dick Beattie’s Christmas party. Charlie is both an adviser to the powerful and their shameless sycophant. If almost any other journalist acted like this, it would be time to get out the pitchforks; but Charlie’s show is so defiantly old-school that his admiration for the powerful comes across as somehow hopeful. When Charlie told Fortune‘s David Kaplan, “You can’t admire anyone more than I admire Warren Buffet,” he sounded like a 7th grader who had just gotten an A in his civics class. Charlie Rose believes in America.

This earnestness, this absence of cynicism is a large part of what’s so damn attractive about Charlie Rose. There are plenty of places, from Rachel Maddow to Bill O’Reilly, where we can watch an interview subject get grilled, blackened, and tossed out. Charlie seems to genuinely respect all of his guests. How could anyone in this era be so open-minded? Is it naivety? Moral cowardice? Or a considered position that the world needs more sober discourse? Whatever the answer, Charlie makes us want to believe—not just in that day’s guest but, most fundamentally, in him.

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Notes:

^* David Foster Wallace picked up on this during his infamous 1997 interview with Rose. The relevant transcript:

DFW: I’m just going to look pretentious talking about this?

CR: Quit worrying about how you’re going to look and just be!

DFW: I have got news for you: coming on a television show stimulates your ‘what am I going to look like’ gland more than any other experience. You may now be such a veteran you don’t notice it anymore.

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