A reader sent me a video-containing email with the header “John Oliver destroys Bari Weiss”, with the message below saying, “Somebody had to do it.” Well, yes, somebody should criticize the Free Press, which is becoming, in my view, more political (right-centrist) and less full of news. And even news stories aren’t really written by seasoned reporters, and it shows. Plus the site has a lot of clickbait.
Further, CBS New’s decision to make Bari Weiss a big macher in the news division shows questionable judgment at best. Weiss, who’s enormously ambitious, has simply spread herself too thin, and it shows.
Those are some of the things criticized by “comedian” John Oliver in his 34-minute rant below. Oliver is rightfully distressed that Bari Weiss has suddenly become editor-in-chief of CBS News, something that concerns me. CBS has a distinguished history of reporting, including Edward R. Murrow, who took down Joe McCarthy on that network, as well as America’s Most Trusted Anchor, Walter Cronkite. Granted, Weiss is not an anchorperson, and editors usually stay off the air, but she’s already hosted a town hall interview with Erika Kirk, something I found cringeworthy. And Weiss promises that there will be many more town halls to come. Oy!
But Oliver, whom I almost never watch, goes after Weiss and CBS in the too-long and unfunny rant below. I’m always mystified that people find Oliver worthy of watching. He’s like the latter-day Jon Stewart, all sweaty, ranty, and, most sinfully, not funny at all. He doesn’t make you think, as Maher does: he goes after the low-hanging fruit that his followers want to eat. To me, his humor and political perspicacity are far less engaging than Bill Maher’s. And Oliver is hyperbolic, and when he characterizes Weiss’s written resignation from the NYT as “self-mythologizing.” He also faults her for having control over the direction of CBS news but “not being a reporter.” Well, she was a columnist and surely engages with the news, so I don’t find being a “reporter” disqualifying from being an editor. But others may disagree.
That said, I am losing interest in the Free Press as well, and yet I keep subscribing—almost entirely because I love Nellie Bowles’s Friday TGIF columns.
I’ll quote with permission from an email sent me by reader Jim Batterson when I sent him the link to the rant below. He stopped subscribing to the Free Press a while ago. Bat:
I think Bari lost her focus. She had a good focus on Israel and antisemitism as well as the excesses of Woke back when she left the New York Times. She started off Common Sense and early versions of The Free Press with proper in-depth critique if I recall correctly, but at some point spread herself all over the map…more chaos than heterodoxy. I unsubscribed from TFP somewhere around when she was giving oxygen to the “it escaped from a lab” speculation, piling on Fauci, and starting her love affair with religion (I had thought her Judaism was much like my ow—cultural— and that she was of the Jewish people, not a deeply observant Jew).
Listening to Oliver is a painful experience to me. Freddie deBoer points out the problem with Oliver’s sneering, progressive condescension. deBoer’s column is largely about gender, but I’m highlighting the problems with Oliver’s progressivism combined with his hyperbolic humorlessness:
I get it: nominating John Oliver as a symbol of liberalism’s failures was well-worn territory a decade ago. This argument has already been made, all the ideological fruit plucked. And the broader debate about liberal condescension as a profound political advantage for the right has percolated in its current form since the 2016 election and in a more general sense for longer than any of us have been alive. I hate to fight yesterday’s war, and I hate to bore you with arguments that have already been made. But at some point, when you see liberals share the same videos week after week of an annoying British man sneering down a camera lens to tell you how stupid everyone else is, you do have to ask if the American left-of-center has any sense at all of how much their project has been damaged by their reputation for patronizing self-righteousness. If the Trump era has proven anything, it’s just how wildly sensitive voters are to the perception that someone somewhere is judging them. That level of sensitivity to vague slights is stupid and the grievance usually disingenuous, but that’s politics, baby. And Oliver is such a pitch-perfect caricature of progressive self-regard – snarky, aloof, judgmental, incurious – that I sometimes wonder if his show is a brilliant op pulled off by the Heritage Foundation.
One of the great weaknesses of contemporary liberalism is the absolute inability to take an L on any issue; scroll around on BlueSky and you’ll find, for example, vast throngs of progressives who are completely unwilling to admit that mass immigration of unskilled labor into the United States is deeply unpopular. I think the left’s control of our arts, culture, and ideas industries have left too many of us thinking that we can’t lose a culture war. But in the broad sense, we currently are.
A pox on both their houses. Without further ado: Oliver tires to take down Weiss.
I tried to watch it when it came out, but found it intellectually lazy and couldn’t finish watching. His initial criticisms are Weiss’ attire and the terrible drawings of David Mamet in TGIF. I can imagine that if the Right would criticize a prominent lefty woman for her clothes, John Oliver would be apoplectic. Thank you for including deBoer’s commentary. To his observation that Oliver is “snarky, aloof, judgmental, incurious,” I can add “shallow”.
I want a way to pay for just that column.
That’s the part I shall miss, having just opted not to renew my subscription. The knowledge that the FP annoys Oliver will have to be added to the ‘pro’ column when or if I ever reconsider.
In these inflationary days I have to allot my subscriptions carefully. I have dropped Matt Taibbi and The Free Press; The Dispatch is still a must-have for the quality of their writers.
I first saw Oliver on The Daily Show.
LAUGHED MY $&@ OFF
A unique, dynamic combination of irreverence, prank call style(IMHO), reaction, rudeness, politeness (suit/tie), low-brow, wit (wit!) – apparent infiltration of political etc. institutions (they’d get interviews with “serious” figures) for a total down-to-Earth smashup satire of tiresome, banal political interview shows.
Some of the later stuff had me laughing too … but the premises seemed to be totally different many times.
So, maybe eliciting a laugh in the old vein, but where’d this unexpected scolding/preaching come from oh it’s just Woke gnosticism again.
I used to watch Oliver regularly, and I liked his irreverent attitude to authority. I went off him when he started to epitomise “progressive” authoritarianism.
Oliver’s old podcast The Bugle is still one of my favorites. It was consistently funny. This new Oliver is very different.
You made us watch John Oliver, PCC(E), again. (sigh)
We’ll forgive you of course but you’ll have to be nice to us for awhile.
D.A.
NYC
Watch some Henning Wehn as an antidote. This is a very old routine that I saw when he first came over. He is spot on on the British psyche 😂
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v_4sKTgncbQ&pp=ygUeaGVubmluZyB3ZWhuIEdlcm1hbiBhbWJhc3NhZG9y
Nice! IMO some very good Brit-style deadpan comic timing:
“I don’t want to ruin the atmosphere [slight pause], but you’re doomed.”
He is also very good unscripted. He appears on tv and radio panel shows. If you get a chance to watch him on ‘Would I Lie To You?’ he’s very good at bluffing and it’s hard to tell whether he’s telling a true story or not.
I’m sure there are things about Bari Weiss to criticize, but I can’t stand to watch the obnoxious John Oliver. The ink on her contract at CBS has barely dried, so I’m going to give Weiss some time before passing judgment.
So you like that an agent of trump took over CBS and is steering the network into a ditch, gotcha.
There is a premise to John Oliver’s show that what you are hearing is the result of careful analysis, of objective research into each matter. He uses statistics and graphs. His presentation is logical, gives a bird’s-eye view for perspective and then narrows and distills each issue down to core principles. There is always a brief glimmer of even-handedness and fairness.
The premise is that John has a handle on the truth, has done the hard work so you don’t have to, and that he leavens his insightful veracities with snarky humor.
And then I saw his take on Israel and Palestine.
It was shallow, ahistorical, biased as hell, full of righteous anger and wrong on every point and level. And that was when I knew he could not be trusted on anything. His premise is false.
+1.
Oliver is not the only one who presents comedy as “news”, but unfortunately the boundary between news information and entertainment has been terribly blurred for some time. To me, he really stands out in a not-good-way when he does his teach-in over something that I happen to know a thing or two about. Israel and Weiss being but recent examples. My wife, who is to the left of me, can’t stand him.
The last time I saw a clip of John Oliver he was ridiculing the notion that men have any physical advantages over women in sports and asserting that trans women ARE women full stop. He is a moron.
Not really; he’s just one of the many apparently-reflective victims of Dunning-Kruger.
Indeed!
A good link on the subject is “Men are stronger than women (on average)” (https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2015/02/25/men-are-stronger-than-women-on-average/)
I’m sure John Oliver doesn’t have any athletic advantage over the average woman.
Yes! And is either proud of it, or pretends to be.
I think that some of what Freddie deBoer (full disclosure, I am a paid subscriber to him) says about Oliver also applies to Heather Cox Richardson. Hers is one of the largest Substacks, as large as The Free Press. Rarely does a conversation with my bien pensant university friends go by without them telling me her opinion on any political topic. I agree with some of it, being on the left myself. But the woman lacks the capacity or desire to understand why anyone would vote for Trump, be concerned about unregulated immigration, care about inflation, etc. It’s all due to “misinformation” or stupidity. Never is it about failures on the part of the Democrats. She was “surprised” when Trump won in 2024.
After the 2024 election Jon Stewart interviewed Cox Richardson. She was as dour as ever, calling the election result proof of her thesis that the USA is an illegitimate, profoundly racist and hateful colonialist slaver project. Of course Stewart just nodded along humbled by her presence. That was the first and last time I’d ever heard of her.
I think Oliver is funny, but he has some gen Z writers and it’s cringe(as the kids say) to hear gen Z jokes coming from a middle-aged man. And I never take any of this comedy show’s reporting at face value.
I stopped reading FP when they started publishing multiple climate denial pieces. So tedious and predictable.
I’ve cancelled too. Their extremely Trumpy commenters are the last straw.
Love the quotes you added when referring to “comedian” John Oliver. Maybe it’s just me, but I find him tedious and unfunny. Just like James Cordon. Craig Ferguson is another, I saw him on stage here when he used to be very funny as Bing Hitler, even though he copied his act from Jerry Sadowitz.
It’s interesting how comedy varies from country to country. There’s a stereotype that Germans don’t have a sense of humour, but Henning Wehn has moved the UK and he’s brilliant. He’s very sharp on cultural differences.
Just promise not to send Oliver back, as you did with Piers Morgan!
We’ll keep Reginald D Hunter and Rich Hall.
I also have never liked Oliver. From the start I found him a loud, braying jackass, with hamfisted timing and no subtlety. Over the years he’s gotten more sanctimonious, self-righteous, and unbearable.
The finest news satirist produced by the UK is Christ Morris, and his shows “The Day Today” and “BrassEye” have aged much better than anything from Oliver ever will.
I can’t remember what I saw Oliver on first, it can’t have been that memorable. I didn’t see him for a long time and then he turned up in America. Maybe I should give Chris Morris another try. I started to watch the Brass Eye on paedophilia but had to turn it off as I didn’t get it. Maybe I would see the satire better nowadays.
“A loud braying jackass, with hamfisted timing and no subtlety” is a quite apt description of John Oliver. Hell, the goat in this video has much better timing and comedic sense than does John Oliver.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp0Bt2cbcc8
CBS (Edward R. Murrow) did “Harvest of Shame” in 1960. Smoking cigarettes may have killed him.
John Oliver. is not someone I follow, though I have seen some of his segments. As per some other comments already, sometimes he was funny but frequently something seems off with him, not particularly funny, not subtle, and, even if I agree with his premise, a bit awkward.
Never saw his Israel/Palestine stuff & just as well, spared my blood pressure or something.
But a friend sent me his segment on “transgender” (men in women’s spaces, generally) in sports, his big response to JK Rowling. Goddam, it was awful! I mean, on beyond awful. It left a lasting bad impression that is not likely to change.
Why Zionism is True dislikes John Oliver for one reason, and we all know what it is.
Do you have a link?