Did John Oliver just trump Jon Stewart with Edward Snowden interview?

NEW YORK Has incisive investigative journalism, sharp-eyed cultural criticism, and engaging news-related interviewing found its most contemporary television voice with John Oliver?

Just about to mark its first-year anniversary, HBOs Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, version 2.0 of the so-called fake news genre popularized by the likes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert over the past decade, surprised its growing number of viewers on Sunday with an unannounced taped interview with the most famous hero and/or traitor in recent American history, Edward Snowden.

And with the interview, Mr. Oliver, with an even more aggressively lewd and profane brand of HBO-permitted humor, once again upped the ante for the liberal-leaning comedy genre. He has transformed traditional satire and news parody into what some are calling some of the most effective civic journalism on television today.

Hes trying to make abstruse policy relatable in a way that closes the loop for citizens to participate actively in the process, says Aram Sinnreich, professor at Rutgers Universitys School of Communication and Information in New Brunswick, N.J. And he did it in a way that was rigorous, nonsensationalistic, and surprisingly nuanced.

Indeed, many credited the British-born comedian with changing the national debate over net neutralitylast year, introducing Title II of the hoary Federal Communications Act to many viewers and causing millions of them to inundate the Federal Communications Commission with pro-net neutrality comments. The agency eventually decided to regulate the Internet as a utility under said Title II a move few ever thought politically feasible.

Its been nearly two years since Mr. Snowden, the exiled former National Security Agency contractornow living in Russia, infamously leaked top-secret government documents, exposing the stunning scope of the American governments massive domestic surveillance operations, authorized by the post-9/11 USA Patriot Act in 2001. He faces espionage charges in the United States.

And this time, Oliver has reintroduced Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the part of the law that has given the federal government a virtual carte blanche to spy on US citizens and is set to expire on June 1.

Refresh your memory: Section 215, which Im aware sounds like an eastern European boy band, Oliver said during Sundays telecast. Then, with a Slavic-tinged accent: We are Section 215; prepare to have your hearts throbbed. Theres the cute one, the bad boy, the one who strangled a potato farmer, and the one without an iron deficiency. Theyre incredible!

Yet jokes decidedly not aside, Oliver has brought a civic earnestness and unabashed advocacy to the news that his staff researches thoroughly, observers note.

A lot of people have been critical ... that the younger generation gets its news this way, and that they dont know the difference between comedy and the news, says Paul Levinson, media critic and professor of communications and media studies at Fordham University in New York. But I always thought the criticism itself was nonsense, because whoever was getting their news that way was getting real news.

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Did John Oliver just trump Jon Stewart with Edward Snowden interview?