Last Week Tonight With John Oliver and the Stewart/Colbert Impact on U.S. Political Communication in the Post-Network Era

Chapter 2 analyzes Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (LWT), the political news satire show aired on HBO since 2014. While TDS satirized TV journalism’s coverage of news and TCR parodied the conservative rhetoric in the media, LWT presents investigations, generating in-depth coverage of national and international public interest issues. Chapter 2 analyzes LWT in relation to the academic debates and scholarly work generated by its successful predecessors. By contextualizing and examining the show in relation to the evolution of political infotainment in the United States, I show how LWT not only fills gaps left by mainstream media, but also takes satire to a more international, activist, and investigative level. Because U.S. political infotainment has been internationally influential, this chapter also serves to illuminate the debates about the genre to be applied to the Latin American cases, which have remained academically unexplored.