John Oliver is funny until he covers a segment that you have spent a lot of personal time researching then it becomes shocking when you realize that he selectively edits things to craft a certain narrative in the viewers mind. I also saw this with Trevor Noah when Bernie Sanders was running. I was a volunteer tasked with digging up lots of old videos of him for promotional material and I was shocked to see some of the videos I found aired on the Daily Show but deceptively cut to make him look like a grumpy mean old man when if you watched the whole clip it would show the opposite.
In the segment about Boeing they purposefully mislead the audience into believing instead of issuing a software update, the company issued stock buy backs. Looking at the dates if the source articles shows a much different timeline.
I think Oliver is funny. His show makes good points and gives good arguments. It should not, however, by itself be the sole basis of one’s opinion on any given topic (not many things should) as many take it to be. It is intelligent and honest but also one-sided and biased.
They are, at least, not generally purposefully misleading in service of their bias, which is why I think people trust them more than a lot of other sources like cable news.
Agree, nobody should base their opinions on a single source of news.
As someone who stopped taking certain news outlets on my side of the political spectrum serious after running into Gell-Mann once to often, I have to say, with decent backgroind in the topic we discuss here, aerospace and quality and such, this particular LWTN segment got it right. Heck, some of it was even than what I heard in my life from co-workers in the industry. I wouldn't go as far as doing a reverse Gell-Mann on LWTN based on this, but overall their reporting is, factually, correct. And they don't even try to hide their bias, nor donthey use to spin a story, which is refreshing if you ask me.
News in video format is guaranteed to be missing nuance. It turns out, reading a teleprompter as a funny/angry/whatever character is completely unrelated to journalism.
Another neat heuristic is that if there's a video/blog/whatever information product more often than once a week, it probably doesn't have enough research behind it to be reasonably accurate, even handed, and well, researched.
Journalism is stupidly expensive. Modern advertising actually doesn't pay enough to do it. Consider that just since 2008, newsroom employees have dropped by 20% or so, while the information space has significantly more manufactured misinformation than it ever used to. How many local government stories do you even see anymore? Are you paying for someone to keep tabs on your state legislators?
Is there a right wing comedy show that is in the format of John Oliver or Daily Show? Closest I can think of is Babylon Bee but they produce (unfunny) original parodies.
I've seen a couple of attempts - like 1/2 hour news hour - but they're all terminally unfunny. The problem is punching up vs punching down. Left-wing humor tends to make a mockery of power and social injustice, whereas right-wing comedy tends to make a mockery of groups and ideas that most of society has sympathy for. The right is simply too cruel to be funny.
This might be an example of a bubble you unknowingly live in. "Gutfeld" is the right wing equivalent and has more viewers than the Colbert late night show which you might have heard of.
Being in a bubble is not what makes Gutfeld not funny.
When your entire comedy seems to be built around "Hah the stupid left thinks trans women are real women but they were born with penises", well, that's just not very funny to people who tend to have a non-homogenous friend group.
Exactly, not all of us on the left are that stupid. It's just that a particularly stupid faction of the left is drawing a lot of attention on that topic. The rest of us see the concept of "male women" being as ridiculous as the right-wingers do.
It would make sense if it was more so a neoliberal show posing as a left wing show, comedy is one of the easiest ways to divide up a public so they can be conquered.
