Folks like Oliver hate Weiss because her path to success—building a real business that meets a customer demand, generates revenue and employs people—is one that can’t be gifted upon someone based on their checking boxes and playing office politics. The weasel word here is “qualified.”
How and why did a news business that makes $18 million in revenue get valued at $150 million? That sort of multiple is typically only seen by high growth tech firms .
I didn’t say his viewpoint was self-serving. It’s ideological. A system based on box checking and politics makes it easier to achieve liberal social and political goals.
Seems like a just-so story. You could have just said Oliver has it out for Weiss over politics and ideology, and I'd have agreed. But you came up with this weird specific story instead.
You're doing the thing where you ignore all the substance to concern-troll about the source. The Oliver piece walks through extensively documented failures in Weiss's work - from Times colleagues contradicting her "civil war" claims in real-time, to Washington University finding her trans clinic allegations unsubstantiated, to families she featured publicly stating she misrepresented their stories. NBC, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Missouri Independent all did independent follow-up reporting that contradicted her work.
You're not engaging with any of the actual substance - you're just doing meta-commentary about whether people should trust sources. If you've got a substantive defense of her work that addresses the specifics of Oliver's piece, let's hear it. Otherwise this is just ad hominem.
John Oliver is well-known for his shameless propagandizing even more so than Bari Weiss is. He particularly relies on lies of omission and attacking strawman arguments. This video is the pot calling the kettle black.
Moral smugness combined with a total lack of intellectual curiosity, dressed up as comedy, does not make for reliable analysis on anything.
(2) A few I did, to learn more. Fun facts: The show has won multiple Peabody Awards which explicitly cite its work as "rigorous journalism disguised as comedy". Its large research/fact-checking team is largely staffed with people with journalism and policy background. Every word spoken is vetted for accuracy and potential liability by HBO's legal department.
(1) Did you find anything factually incorrect with the episode?