When Brian Lamb launched C-SPAN in 1979, he set into motion a multi-decade experiment in news media that was both maximalist and minimalist: wall-to-wall coverage of the American government, but unmediated by actual journalists, allowing us, the public, to decipher and decode. It was an ethos that animated Lamb’s own interviewing style, as the host of C-SPAN’S Q&A program, where he conducted his work like an informational exhibitionist, baring all, no matter the message. Lamb was not one to intrude or to object to his guest’s claims. He was so studiously neutral, so generously passive, that Christopher Hitchens once remarked that Lamb was a “fine Democrat as well as a good Republican.” Lamb himself is reluctant to identify as a journalist. “Whatever I might be,” he prefers to say.

Lamb, who was CEO of C-SPAN until 2012, stepped down this May as the host of Booknotes after conducting what he estimates to be 2,000-plus interviews in his lifetime. Lamb’s status in news journalism has long been emeritus-like, unbeholden to ratings (as a nonprofit, the network has never been monitored by Nielsen) or shareholders. He’s been free to shape the news as he sees fit—which is to say, by not shaping it at all.

But after decades of delivering this raw content to an estimated 47 million viewers a week on television, plus another 70 million online, what, if anything, has the public gained by such neutrality? And where do Lamb’s views fit into present-day concerns about a “post-truth” era in which politicians like Donald Trump have hacked the news industry’s “objective” standards to disseminate lies and propaganda? Lamb begins a defense of his methods with a promise: “You will come away very frustrated by this discussion.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Your interview style has been mythologized for your refusal to impose yourself in an exchange. Yet you’ve also been outspoken about the political class’ penchant for lying. So how did you maintain such a good-faith attitude toward your subjects over the years, during the course of thousands of interviews?