The folk at PowerLine (and elsewhere) are incensed by a recent Time interview with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The premise behind the complaints would appear to be that if you’re going to print the thoughts of a world leader who also happens to be a reprehensible thug, you must fulminate like an A.M. radio host throughout the interview and ask lots of pointed, hard questions he won’t answer meaningfully, since the point of these interviews is (apparently) not to try to give Americans a glimpse of how a dangerous and influential figure thinks, but to afford the reporter an opportunity to display his prodigious sack. Permit me to demur.

The nice thing about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—and there are few enough—it that he’s so openly crazy. What Time and PowerLine presumably would agree with was that this has been the year of “you”—of ever more participatory media whose consumer/producers no longer expect or want a single stentorian voice telling them “that’s the way it is in the world today.” Why, then, should we think it isn’t perfectly sufficient to give a patent maniac enough column inches to hang himself and trust readers to figure this out without a bombastic voice-over explaining the proper reaction?