last night on late night

John Oliver Warns That Soon You Won’t Even Be Able to Watch Local News to Escape Our Despairing National Politics

John Oliver has spent much of 2017 exploring little crevasses of despair in Trump’s America, but on Sunday night, the Last Week Tonight host turned his attention to a seemingly apolitical institution: local news. As Oliver tells it, however, the days of trusting your citywide station for in-depth crime and weather reports and little else may soon be numbered. This is because of Sinclair Broadcast Group, the “most influential media company you’ve never heard of,” and their verging-on-successful effort to essentially co-opt the local news market for a specific kind of conservative agenda (i.e., the kind that uses “Muslim” and “terrorist” interchangeably). Oliver, ever the realist, could only leave viewers with a fairly bleak warning: “Good luck with that shit.”

John Oliver Warns of the Conservative Takeover of Local News