It's The Video Clip, Stupid (A John Oliver Take)
In John Oliver’s most recent blend of prank, gonzo journalism, and comedy sketch, the HBO host successfully bought three “integrated advertising spots” on local news stations to promote a magnetic sexual healing blanket, a snake oil product of Oliver’s imagining, to the people of Austin and Utah. These three spots cost him less than $7,000. With that money, he got five minutes a piece with three chief medical correspondents, real anchors and real journalists who have forged real careers in medical communication, who were all too happy to hear about how this blanket could magnetize the iron in our blood to restart the vagina through a process called microdeath.
My mom said that this prank reminded her of my blog, and I do see the resemblance. John Oliver likes to suss out all the ways that the authorities we trust are bankrupt: I like his previous work on frivolous SLAPP lawsuits, and his sex blanket isn’t the first time he’s excoriated the role of advertising in modern medicine.
I’ve thought a lot about credibility in the context of consumption, and John Oliver’s point with this prank is that there are many sources that we take at face value whose legitimacy has been scarred by the world of advertising. John Oliver’s sexual blanket, to me, looks no different from the fake medical experts with fake medical credentials drafted into The Strategist’s article on pillows.
Well, maybe there is one insidious difference. A chief medical correspondent is someone with legitimate credibility, and though not credentialed by any medical board, we take them in good faith. They’re credentialed in the court of public opinion (medical board of public opinion?). I wonder how many of these chief medical correspondents that John Oliver payed off bravely and diligently communicated the facts about COVID-19 as they developed, how many evangelized for the vaccines. In many ways, these chief medical correspondents are my supposed comrades-in-arms. I work in healthcare to save lives, and I suspect these duped medical correspondents feel they do the same.
Though, it’s not fair to say that Oliver duped them. I’m not duped when someone pays me to be duped. Unlike writers for large affiliate marketing websites who are advertisers by trade, characters who neither have a fiduciary responsibility to their reader nor necessarily the professional expertise to delineate hopeful cures from hucksters, these medical correspondents have made a career out of cures, out of health. Or at least, we like to think so.
I think the most edifying part of the clip comes at the 14 minute mark, when an advertising executive pitching brands on the power of such integrated local news spots says that the point of advertising on local news isn’t to capture the attention of a slowly dying viewership. Instead, it’s all about “getting a video clip to post everywhere.”
It’s funny in a way, since that’s what all television has become. After all, I’m watching a John Oliver clip right now, a clip that was posted everywhere online. That’s been the critique of late night shows and SNL for years now, that they exist as factories for creating social media content. It looks like the same dynamic has reached local news.
For both SNL and these integrated advertisements, I posit that this is because the older medium has significantly more credibility than its younger sibling, the Internet. Though we marvel at the democratic world we’ve made where anyone can make a YouTube channel and publish a video essay, we still see TV, if only because of its rarefied age, as a source of greater credibility. Certainly, Elon Musk or Donald Trump could have just made a little spot on YouTube, but they went on SNL because it is venerated.
Television, in its last gasp, provides an aura of credibility to the things that we now largely watch online. As seen on TV is its own form of credibility, its own aesthetic feature of our media landscape. John Oliver may be right to point out the particular betrayal of trust that occurs when a chief medical correspondent hawks a sex blanket, but that’s just what television is for nowadays: making YouTube clips seem trustworthy.
I know. How grimly I posit. Welcome to the blog; this is sorta my aesthetic.
But of course, it goes without saying that this isn’t just any video clip. Yes, it’s important to point out this little sleight-of-hand that television has been playing the last decade, existing solely for subsequent social media virality, but it’s more important that we revel in the fact that now shoddy products can buy themselves glowing interviews from respected journalists, interviews that look like journalism, and can therefore sell dangerous medical products to the masses.
I don’t think we should stand for this. We should stand against this. But I don’t know where we should actually do that standing; what we can actually do to stand up against this.