John Oliver vs. the FCC

Upon reading reading an article from 2014 on CommonDreams about net neutrality, I knew immediately that while it was not mentioned in the article, the reporter was talking about John Oliver's episode of Last Week Tonight that took on the issue of net neutrality and the FCC.

Each episode of John Oliver's show on HBO is like the Daily Show, (which Oliver hosted while Jon Stewart was on hiatus), in that it gives a run down of media coverage of the news of that week, but for about 15 minutes of each episode, Oliver and his team focus on one prominent issue.

In this particular episode, Oliver addressed the issue of net neutrality, because he felt that it was not being covered well in the media. Oliver states that the way the mainstream media covered the issue made it seem like a boring subject and that limiting it wouldn't really affect the American people in a bad way.

Throughout the clip, Oliver focuses on how net neutrality is a great thing for our country and why it is important for all of us when using the Internet. He then urges all those that comment on YouTube videos and are active commenters on blogs and social media to go tell the FCC that they support net neutrality.

The CommonDreams article highlights how the FCC website crashed due to the amount of traffic they received through commenters about the net neutrality issue. I thought this was important because it shows just how much push independent media has in the world today. HBO is a paid streaming service, yet enough people saw Oliver's push for net neutrality either on their site or on YouTube to crash a government-run website. The mainstream media would not be able (due mostly to policies about objectivity) urge viewers to fight for something like net neutrality, and that just shows how influential and important outlets like Last Week Tonight are to the American people.