How did John Oliver become the moral compass of the US?

The Guardian

a day ago

Some time ago, an acquaintance sent me a cryptic text message. 'Thought of you after I saw one of your recent articles,' they said. 'Thank you for saying it.'
I write columns regularly. Some are about vaginas; some are about the genocide in Gaza. Was this person thanking me for drawing attention to the desperate plight of people on eBay who are prepared to pay five times the original sales price for Gwyneth Paltrow's delisted This Smells Like My Vagina candle? Or were they referencing Gaza?
I suspected the latter, but there was no way of immediately knowing – which often feels par for the course when it comes to the conversation around Gaza. The Trump administration has cracked down on pro-Palestinian speech to such a draconian degree that even within a private text message, some people are too terrified about jeopardising their career or immigration status to speak up. Many lawmakers and parts of the media seem to have lost the ability to communicate in plain English when it comes to Palestine. I have seen long articles handwringing about the desperately complicated situation of starving kids which don't mention the word 'Israel' once. I have lost count of the number of articles talking about 'starvation stalking Gaza' that circle endlessly around exactly how this starvation has come about.
Gaza is almost completely destroyed. There is now a growing consensus that a genocide is under way, and since a plan for the mass displacement of Palestinians to make space for a 'Gaza riviera' was discussed in the Knesset, more people are beginning to speak up. Nevertheless, Gaza-related atrocity denial is so widespread in the US, and the climate of fear around speaking about Palestine so pervasive, that an influential person voicing an unequivocal criticism of Israel's conduct will still make the news.
See, for example, John Oliver. The Last Week Tonight host made headlines this week after he opened his most recent show with a clear-eyed analysis of the human-made famine in Gaza. 'Look, 'Gaza is starving' is a sentence that's objectively true, but it's also slightly misleading because it's too passive,' Oliver said. 'Gaza is being starved by Israel.'
I'm glad to see Oliver spelling this out. But it is enraging that it is a late-night host speaking with clarity rather than editorial boards, cable news anchors or politicians – many of whom seem to treat mass starvation as an unfortunate and unintentional consequence of war rather than a deliberate act. One CBS video from last December, for example, is headlined: 'Hunger spreads virtually everywhere in Gaza amid Israel-Hamas war.' As the Al Jazeera Journalism Review argues, many headlines in major US outlets have similarly described the situation as a 'food crisis' rather than an intentional blockade.
Meanwhile, the rightwing Free Press – which CBS is reportedly mulling buying for up to $250m partly because of its 'pro-Israel stance', according to the FT – described media reporting around starvation in Gaza as part of 'a highly effective campaign of information warfare' against Israel perpetrated by Hamas. And while experts have been warning about famine risks in Gaza since December 2023, an analysis of US media coverage by the watchdog Fair shows most outlets barely covered the situation until it became undeniably grim. 'The conditions of famine have been out in the open for well over a year, and yet it was considered barely newsworthy in US news media,' it says.
Oliver isn't the only late-night host speaking up. Indeed, from the shenanigans of the Trump administration to the starvation of Gaza, late-night hosts (and children's entertainer Ms Rachel) seem to have become the moral voice of the US. The Daily Show's Jon Stewart has also been outspoken about Gaza. 'I have a moral clarity about what I'm seeing,' said Stewart, who is Jewish, in an episode last week where he was speaking to the Jewish Currents editor-at-large, Peter Beinart. 'I feel like a crazy person. I feel as if I'm watching something that is so self-evidently inhumane and horrific. And to be told that I have to shut up because I risk the Jewish state by speaking out? I would say the opposite. I think they're putting the likelihood of a surviving Jewish state much more at risk with this type of action.'
And then there's Stephen Colbert's The Late Show on CBS. Colbert hasn't spoken about Gaza a huge amount, although he did criticise the crackdown on student protests, saying: 'Even if you don't agree with the subject of their protests, as long as they are peaceful, students should be allowed to protest. It's their first amendment right.' He has, however, been very outspoken about Trump. Last month, he said Paramount Global (which owns CBS) deciding to pay a large settlement to Trump over content in a CBS show, 60 Minutes, amounted to a 'big fat bribe'. Three days later, his show was cancelled – many suspect because Paramount higher-ups wanted to stay in Trump's good books to get a merger approved. This seems to have worked. Trump has said: 'I absolutely love that Colbert was fired.'
I bet he does. Late-night hosts seem to be doing far more than certain other influential voices when it comes to speaking truth to power. None of this is funny – but when comedians become the most vocal truth-tellers, it's possible your country has become a joke.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.