FavreFan wrote:
Love me some John Oliver, but this is a pretty good article explaining how overstated his impact really is among the left leaning internet crowd.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainmen ... dy/475485/Quote:
You wouldn’t know it by looking at him, but John Oliver, the host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, is a violent man. In the last year, he’s destroyed a “lying, hypocritical GOP idiot.” He’s eviscerated Congress over the issue of America’s infrastructure. Apparently desiring more viscera—this time from ideas rather than people—he went on to eviscerate voter-ID laws. If you take these headlines—and the articles they advertise—at face value, Oliver’s brand of late-night satire is a force to be reckoned with, and a potent political weapon.
Yet, Oliver’s victims remain surprisingly whole. The aforementioned “lying, hypocritical GOP idiot” is now the governor of Kentucky. Congress—approval ratings notwithstanding—continues to function with the same set of people Oliver reportedly eviscerated a few months ago. And, as many people participating in the current Presidential primaries can tell you, voter-ID laws haven’t gone away. Which probably explains why Donald Trump (despite being destroyed, taken down, demolished, systematically picked apart, annihilated, and...murderslayed?) remains the GOP’s presidential frontrunner. Simply put, the bombastic headlines used to describe Oliver’s late-night antics overstate the real-life impact such takedowns can have. At best, such headlines are exaggerations, but at worst, they perpetuate the myth that late-night comedy is an effective tool for broad political change.
Something seems off about the premise - just who exactly thinks these hosts have any measurable impact on policy or politics in general?
Quote:
To be clear, this isn’t an indictment of any late-night host—as Stewart noted, they already recognize their limits, no matter how funny, investigative, or correct their segments may be. Nor is it an indictment of those who share funny video clips with friends—that’s part of what the Internet is for. That said, given that these segments don’t change policy outcomes and that interest in these bits is pretty ephemeral, it’s time to stop pretending these progressive late-night shows have more calculable political power than they do.
So if the hosts recognize their limits, and if fans are sharing videos for laughs, then where do the "change policy outcomes" and "political power" beliefs come from? Seems like a massive straw man.
EDIT: Unless you're really targeting headlines that say something like "OLIVER SLAUGHTERS XYZ POLICY SUPPORTERS IN UNBELIEVABLE LAST WEEK TONIGHT SEGMENT," in which case you probably had a deadline to meet and couldn't think of something more serious to write about.
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