When John Oliver used some of my work in a piece about water a couple of years ago, I spent a long time with one of the show’s producers as they developed it. Then, right before it aired, I spent more time in an intense round of fact-checking.
It was marvelous. They were fact-checking the jokes.
In a recent interview, Oliver explained the process:
But in terms of the responsibility of journalism, we do have intense fact-checking because we want it to be right. Those big stories are aggregations of incredible journalism. So it cannot function without journalism. Now, we recheck it to make sure it’s accurate or that it hasn’t changed, but we’re building this to make jokes. It’s just we want the foundations to be solid or those jokes fall apart. Those jokes have no structural integrity if the facts underneath them are bullshit.
It is a sad state of affairs when comics spend more time fact checking than some journalists and a lot of politicians.
Thanks a million for the John Oliver water piece. Brilliant.
Do we know if this work produced any positive effect?
Thanks for the reminder about that John Oliver segment. I see that YouTube remembers that I watched it before, probably when it aired 2 years ago. It is a great show. The last two years have been much better for water in the West, so it seems less urgent now, but the good luck won’t last.