John Oliver has a simple message for the media: Stop repeating everything cops tell you. The Last Week Tonight host went long on how often and pervasively the police lie, and he couldn’t help but shake his head at how easily those lies are repeated by the media simply because law enforcement is considered a trustworthy source by default. Oliver even pointed out an easy trick to spot when you should be extremely wary about the sourcing for a news story. Watch out for the words “police say.”
“It’s a phrase that you constantly hear from the mouths of news reporters,” Oliver said. “It’s right up there with ‘this just in,’ or ‘back to you,’ or ‘I apologize for the actions I did on Cinco de Mayo.’”
Jokes aside, Oliver got right down to it. Cops constantly lie for a variety of reasons, and the media should be treating everything they say with “immense skepticism” because often what the police are saying is “complete horsesh*t.” Via HuffPost:
“Police lie,” Oliver said bluntly. “And they lie a lot.”
He recapped some of the stories on “Last Week Tonight” over the years.
“They lie to get search warrants to conduct raids and to get confessions during interrogations,” he said. “And they even lie under oath, so often in fact here in New York it came to be known as ‘testilying.’”
To prove his point, Oliver brought up the recent panic over “rainbow fentanyl” being hidden in children’s Halloween candy. He showed a variety of TV reports repeating press releases from the police verbatim with the exception of one broadcast, which aired a brief disclaimer saying that the whole “fentanyl in candy” thing has never actually happened.
“I’m so glad you tacked that disclaimer on at the end there,” Oliver said. “I’m sure that three-second debunk is exactly what everyone is going to take away from that report, and definitely not the images of little Hulks sticking their hands into bowls of Skittles-shaped smack.”
(Via HuffPost)