by Matt Post ‘18

Every Sunday at 12 midnight, John Oliver takes the stage of his HBO show “Last Week Tonight.” Equipped with his British accent and quirky mannerisms, Oliver tackles issues from Dr. Oz to the death penalty. He tells jokes, the audience laughs, clips are shared online, and this whole cycle divides America.

Oliver is one part of a fast-growing network of left-leaning TV shows that seek to explain current events with humor. On TBS there is Samantha Bee; on Comedy Central, Trevor Noah; on CBS, Stephen Colbert and so on. Clips from these shows are uploaded to YouTube and shared massively the next day. Millions of people turn to Oliver to explain civil forfeiture, or Noah to discuss a police shooting or Bee to analyze the latest campaign moment.

Then they watch nothing else.

Thousands of Americans are beginning to rely on these shows as their definitive source of information. In 2015, 12 percent of Americans said they got all their news from Colbert or fellow host Jon Stewart. Ten percent of young Americans say they place the most journalistic trust in the pair and more than 30 percent of millennials see these comedy shows as the future of news.

But Oliver, Bee, Meyers, Colbert, and Stewart are not journalists and these shows are not journalism.

Complex issues cannot be compressed into a three or five or ten minute segment. These comedians omit information for comedic effect, they exaggerate details to make the topic seem more interesting. Issues with complicated facets do not make for good comedy, so the writers of these shows take one extreme and run with it.

Why mention a reasonable differing opinion when it will not result in applause or laughter? When viewers only watch these comedy shows, they are robbed of the rich context and nuance of current affairs and left with a tiny raisin of liberal bias.

Noah and Bee’s trademark is to relentlessly taunt and insult those with differing opinions, usually Republicans. Instead of inviting figures for interviews, they mock video clips of them, giving the individuals no chance to respond. At the same time, both hosts rip into Fox News for being a partisan source of information, steeped in bias and full of untruths, never noticing the irony. Perhaps without ever noticing it, these hosts perpetuate the political polarization of America they so publicly lament.
Many of the same Americans that take these comedians’ words as the truth see Fox News as biased trash. By no means is the fact-free-fun-zone at Fox News any better, but it is not much worse.

There is nothing wrong with enjoying “Last Week Tonight” or “The Daily Show” or “Full Frontal.” These shows are funny. But they are not news. When Americans rely on these shows to tell them the objective facts, they are depriving themselves and hurting America.