While giving a report about the suffering newspaper industry and the gradual decline of journalism, John Oliver provides a bit of hope for the profession through some journalism of his own.
Oliver is the first to admit that Last Week Tonight is not a real news show, and instead calls it a “stupid show” and a slap in the face of journalists when it is called “journalism”.
However, this admission comes as part of a wider investigation of his own into the state of journalism in which he talks about how it is nothing like what is portrayed in the recent Spotlight movie. Instead, he says, investigative journalism is on the way out and click-bait journalism about puppy dogs is on the way in. This is all because newspapers are going out of business he says.
“Media is a food chain that would fall apart without newspapers,” he says and even points out his own use of newspapers in his reports.
He goes on to talk about how journalism is gravitating towards entertaining the masses instead of holding the few of power to account.
If you don’t want to watch the whole investigation, you could skip to 17:18 to see a raccoon that looks like a cat, or a cat that looks like a raccoon.
