I Dislike John Oliver

I see this kind of argument a lot: Raising awareness is somehow bad if you're not also providing more "direct" contributions to the solution.

Sorry to break it to you, but there's only so much energy one person can contribute, and it requires focus in order to be successful. That's why marketers aren't in the factories, hand-building the product they sell.

But what I DO notice is that people who lodge these sorts of complaints tend to be the same people who themselves aren't doing a damn thing at all. And when one is accomplishing nothing, it often makes one feel better to criticize the doers.

I'm not exactly sure why, but I never found Oliver to be as funny as Jon Stewart, and I find his aggressive style rather offputting. This article though, doesn't make much sense. Why would Oliver get off his hugely influential platform and "[campaign] for change in the real world[, s]tarting small if he had to and working his way up"? He can affect far more change with the platform he has rather than the one blog-author aspires to.

Why I Dislike "Why I Dislike John Oliver".

It's because of this quote:

    To be more specific, what’s really missing from Oliver is skin in the game. He
    weighs in on controversial political topics. Unlike an actual politician
    however, Oliver’s constituency is people who want to chuckle.

About skin in the game: so what? Which of the legendary guys-reading-news-from-a-desk have had skin in the game? Walter Cronkite did not. Alan Brinkley did not. They are reporting the news, that's the job. They aren't supposed to be providing first-person reports as participants in the news being reported.

This is also wrong about the constituency. There are better ways to get yuks. I see John Oliver as making news appealing to those who might otherwise be ignorant. The righteousness often present is certainly part of that same kind of appeal.