London, Feb 14 (TNS): The US-based British comedian warns that the US government has a brain drain that is going to take generations to recover from.
His news entertainment show, Last Week Tonight, attracts a TV and online audience of millions each week. It has become so influential on the subjects he tackles that it is known as the “John Oliver effect. The Emmy award-winning program is about to start a fifth season, and so its host is giving interviews to promote it. I started by asking him how he feels about the prominence of late night entertainment shows in the US right now. He said I think that any time late night comedians are this prevalent in the national conversation, that’s probably not a great sign of national health. If there’s a canary in the coal mine it’s choking at that point. When late night shows are just a side show, generally things are going better. One of his early rants about candidate Trump racked up nearly 34m views on YouTube alone. Even though the avalanche of news around the current administration has been a fruitful topic, Oliver doesn’t seem that happy about it. He said there is an abundance of material to a very real problematic extent. So the problem with that is when it’s coming at you that fast, it’s hard to filter out the stuff that means something, that means nothing, that you can ignore, that you must not ignore at all costs. It’s difficult to regain perspective when you’re just drowning all the time. Oliver said he thinks that Trump represents a genuine threat to America. He’s a fundamental threat to the institutions that this country is built on in a way that is not usually the case with a President on this scale. He is taking an axe to some pretty fundamental parts of American governance. What he’s doing with the State Department is going to have ramifications for years after he has gone. There’s a brain drain in government that is going to take generations to recover from. He said. I would argue that there is nothing that’s not interesting about the British negotiations because that is a s**t show of the highest water.”
He muses on the ever increasing traction of the term “fake news”, and how his own show has turned into a high stakes battle to maintain the trust of his audience.
He said: “We meticulously research the stories we are doing because we take some pretty big swings at politicians and corporations…if we get that wrong, it’s probably over for us, realistically.
We can’t be fake because of the scary consequences that would come with being wrong, but also there is an extent to which if you build a story on sand it’s just going to collapse and you’ve demolished your own argument before anyone’s even attacked it.
Ends/TNS
