John Oliver’s strength at taking tedious or complicated subjects and making them accessible, even hilarious, is one of the wonders of television in the 21st century. This talent was in full force Sunday night, when he spoke about the struggle of newspapers and the price we all pay for declining local news coverage. For journalists and those who follow the media, his 19-minute rant on “Last Week Tonight” — well, a rant plus a hilarious parody of the movie “Spotlight” — brought some much-needed attention to a story that the general public doesn’t understand in much detail.
“We know that we do something hugely important,” Washington Post media critic Margaret Sullivan told me via email, “and we’ve watched it being not-so-slowly destroyed by forces beyond our control — the biggest one of which is the precipitous decline in print advertising which paid the bills for so long.”
For members of a profession that’s seen tens of thousands of jobs lost, or readers who’ve seen their local paper wither over the last decade or so, the episode probably did not add a huge amount of new information. But Oliver’s genius at being “witty, profane, and at the same time dead serious,” as Rick Edmonds of the media site Poynter put it, was valuable nonetheless. Even people who rarely defend the mainstream media — conservative talk-show host John Ziegler, for example — praised the work of the left-leaning “Last Week Tonight.”
So part of what’s interesting about Oliver’s bit — which looked at both the causes of the decline as well as the effects, with his usual combination of hyperventilating moralism and comic exaggeration — is that some seem frustrated with it. And not just people who hate the press, but people who value what it does.
The most visible of these criticisms so far has come from the president of the Newspaper Association of America, who praised the segment’s opening. “But making fun of experiments,” David Chavern wrote, “and pining away for days when classified ads and near-monopolistic positions in local ad markets funded journalism is pointless and ultimately harmful.”
Sullivan, who was once the executive editor of the Buffalo News and the public editor of the New York Times, hit back sharply in a Post piece:
Actually, no. What Oliver did was precisely nail everything that’s been happening in the industry that Chavern represents: The shrinking staffs, the abandonment of important beats, the love of click bait over substance, the deadly loss of ad revenue, the truly bad ideas that have come to the surface out of desperation, the persistent failures to serve the reading public.
Sullivan’s piece is pretty complete and needs little assistance from me. But I’ll just add, in Oliver’s defense, that no news story or TV coverage needs to solve all the problems it identifies. Part of the reason that the cult of “free” has been able to erode the revenues of musicians, photographers, and journalist so deeply is that the general public has not understood the overlapping crises and their stakes. To David Boardman, dean of Temple University’s journalism school, the Oliver segment “made a persuasive case that all Americans should be concerned about the fate of newspapers and should do what they can to support their local paper.”
The other main critique of Oliver’s performance was that it was unhelpfully moralistic. A professor and blogger for the London School of Economics, Charlie Beckett, challenged the comedian’s argument that local journalism has a moral function. When journalism tries to appeal to people’s “noble instincts,” as Beckett puts it, rather than generating something people want, it takes its place alongside every other charity. Instead, other publications, like The Economist and the Financial Times, give readers something valuable, and are kept alive by subscriptions: It’s better, he says, than guilt trips.
Source
http://www.salon.com/2016/08/10/john-olivers-newspaper-rant-hits-a-nerve-weve-watched-it-being-not-so-slowly-destroyed-by-forces-beyond-our-control/
