John Oliver’s Weak Case for Callout Culture
On the most recent episode of Last Week Tonight, an HBO show that often sounds as if The Daily Show and The Rachel Maddow Show had combined their writers’ rooms, John Oliver dedicated his monologue to public shaming.
After a brief survey of excesses culled from local television-news reports, the host said, “You may be expecting me to say that all public shaming is bad, but I don’t actually think that.” In his estimation, “misdirected internet pile-ons can completely destroy people’s lives.” But if public shaming is “well directed,” then “a lot of good can come out of it. If someone is caught doing something racist or a powerful person is behaving badly, it can increase accountability.”
The balance of the segment did not substantiate his thesis.
As an example of the phenomenon’s ostensible upside, he alighted on
