Last Week Tonight: in Need for a bit of Supplementation

By Cliff Yung on July 24, 2014

The Last Week Tonight show with John Oliver has made headlines for it often draws attention to topics that the vast public has not known about, or at the very least not focused on. This week he discussed the broken prison system. Within the given segment of time, the show is very informative about the topic at hand. However, the issues John Oliver speaks of, more often than not, are much more complex than being able to explain the issue in the allotted time. Particularly, for the prison system, John Oliver chose not to dive into Angela Davis’s idea of abolishing prisons (a more condensed version) from societies, or at least attempting to digest this point of view. This notion was left out and for a good reason: John Oliver does not seem to support this point of view.

as found on twitter.com/LastWeekTonight

His views on the broken prison system and the lack of representation of Angela Davis’s abolishment of prisons are understandable for this segment. Another segment that I found extremely lacking in content would be on the idea of “Net Neutrality.” John Oliver does draw out the absurdity of how the internet corporations are undermining the politics to benefit the few. But, as before, the issue is much more complex than it seems. To supplement John Oilver’s segment, I found the PBS Idea Channel’s video on “Net Neutrality” extremely informative. Unlike John Oliver’s segment, PBS Idea Channel brings out the political battle that would change the internet into a “public utility,” thus ensuring the status of its “neutrality.”

John Oliver does extremely well in bring out the issues that often are avoided and not talked about within the general public because of societal reasons. However, many of these topics are grazed over and lightly touched. Informative as John Oliver is, if you really want to know the complete relevance of any of the discussed topics, you need to supplement his segments with outside sources in order to have a discursive understanding of the topic.

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