Ok, I'm gonna come right out and say it: the only news I watch on a regular basis comes from the mouth of John Oliver on "Last Week Tonight", the HBO weekly news show. Sure, I occasionally watch The Daily Show, but I have not regularly tuned into CNN, Fox News, or MSNBC in quite a little bit. Now before you go thinking I am ill-informed about the happenings of the world, know I have the CNN app, BBC News, as well as a local news app, and get regular updates on what is going on in the world. So I am informed about what is going on in the world, I just choose not to watch the "regular" news.
Some of you may be thinking "But Doug, you can't possibly be serious. Why would you spend your time watching a man who turns everything into a joke?" Well, reader, here's why. He refuses to play petty politics or get roped into debates over the silly things. The 24-hour news cycle demands the type of coverage we have from traditional news outlets, anchors who sit and act as moderators for a wide array of viewpoints on any given topic. However, how much does one get from listening to a shouting match from 2, 3, sometimes 4 people, all with different stances on any given topic. To limit topics to 90 seconds, 2-minute debates and then moving on not only limits the amount of time each person gets to speak but also limits the viewpoints that get expressed.
Instead of what traditional news outlets do, John Oliver does in-depth, investigative journalism into one topic, and goes deep. He spends about twenty minutes every episode on a single topic, one that matters to everyone and can result in change across the board. He pulls in studies, government reports, interviews from local news outlets, anything he needs to in order to get the given message across. Yes, he has a clear bias, but he owns that bias and does not try to hide it. We all know that Fox news is more conservative and CNN is more liberal, but they will never claim it. They will go to their graves claiming to be unbiased, reporting "just the facts" and nothing else. But let's be honest: they are human. We all come to the table with our given biases, our experiences, and ultimately that shapes our thought processes. To say that one can put all that aside and report pure facts would be a lie. Even if you are reporting just facts, the words that one uses and the tonal inflections will give said biases away. Or, you may report facts, but time spent on them can also reveal your biases. Giving Trump more than 4 hours extra news coverage over Clinton during the elections is clearly a bias, regardless of how honest the facts may be.