Interview with John Oliver
(Good Old-Fashioned Journalism)
That interview with John Oliver
in the NYTimes I watched early
this afternoon. Watching a news
paper on my laptop as if it were
a sitcom on a television set.
The Media of My Youth, starring
new anchors John Chancellor,
Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather,
Tom Brokaw, can’t count Barbara
Walters, but she sure made the
stars cry (that’s entertainment).
Maybe Connie Chung? How
the interviewer kept trying
to get Oliver to fess up to
working within the profession.
Of journalism. How he would
always object, in that absolute
yet half-hearted way, that he
was a comedian, that this was
his way to that thing he loved
more than anything, laughter
and cultivation, civility and
refinement: Comedy. There
was an afterward. She called
him after the interview, which was
tacked onto the end of the filmed
version, which ran audio only, with
a black and white still of a very-
serious-looking Oliver, in which he
revealed a key to his reticence when
it came to suggesting that in any
way he was practicing the same
profession as her. “I’m British,”
and he reminded how his pre
decessors had made a mess of
things in their attempts at lay
ing down the law of right and
wrong, shoving those rules to
the ends of the world in such
catastrophically unethical ways.
Which also surely had something
to do with his insistence on getting
each story true, thoroughly fact-
