[cxr]

How strange:

- by one's own admission, doesn't know much about the matter (EDIT: correction, "didn’t know anything"), and yet

- still feels confident enough to voice one's approval for a given information source positioning itself as informative

Suppose it's a bad source—filled with sleights of hand and intellectual dishonesty for cheap laughs, for example. How would you know?

[CharlesW]

Had you watched TFV before posting this, you’d have known that easily-verified receipts are shared as part of the overview.

[cxr]

A couple things:

1. I watched the video prior to posting.

2. Did you verify them?

[benzible]

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.

[aiunt]

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.

[benzible]

Way to answer a comment pointing out substance-free ad hominem with... substance-free ad hominem.

[CharlesW]

(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?