Net Neutrality 2 John Oliver Analysis

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In the HBO segment titled, “Net Neutrality II: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”, the host, John Oliver, successfully informs his audience about the negative connotations of a new bill that will abolish net neutrality and how they’ve been lied to by politicians and corporations. This segment was released in May of this year, and ISP companies were starting to show their support for net neutrality even though they were really backing the opposite of it so Oliver decided to make it his duty to let the public know what was really going on.
In order to ensure that he keeps his audience’s full attention and that the message will be memorable, Oliver uses pathos with comedy. Not only does he reach his HBO viewers, he also reaches millions more
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He talks about how most people do not really know what net neutrality is, and he enforces this thought with the fact that Donald Trump, our current president, tweeted, “Obama’s attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media.” Oliver explains that this tweet shows that Trump’s understanding of net neutrality is the complete opposite of what it actually means. By showing this tweet, Oliver is using logos to make his audience realize that if their president does not know what net neutrality is, he definitely will not be doing anything to safeguard it. This helps them think that they need to take it into their own hands if they want the internet to stay unchanged. Three years ago, Oliver had his first segment on net neutrality and it was a success. He shows how he got his viewers to actually crash the FCC’s website by sending in so many complaints and how Obama passed laws protecting it. But coming back to Trump, he shows that Trump is trying to pass a bill that will essentially revert, or as Oliver says, “Control-Z,” those laws, not even knowing what they mean. He hopes this causes his viewers to be angry that their president is blindly changing laws without them even knowing the effects the laws will have on them. So Oliver recruits his audience to complain on the FCC’s …show more content…
He uses the majority of the country’s disapproval of President Trump to gain viewers and get his point across. He makes sure that it is known that Trump is the one that appointed Ajit Pai to head of the FCC, and combined with that fact that Trump doesn’t even know what net neutrality actually is, he hopes his viewers will realize how essential it is to take action against Pai, Trump, the FCC, and ISPs. He shows how Verizon even recently aired a commercial where they defend themselves against these accusations and say they will not take away net neutrality as there is no evidence of this happening yet. Oliver makes it a priority to point out that the ISPs have not done anything to net neutrality yet because they are not able to without the bill being passed so they most likely will get rid of it as they have done similar things before. This is where the example of Google Wallet vs ISIS comes in. In the past, Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile all blocked Google Wallet from their phones because they were backing ISIS Mobile Wallet. Bringing this up not only gives viewers an example of ISPs taking advantage of their power, something they will easily be able to do without net neutrality, but it also connects these companies with ISIS in the viewers’ minds. He hopes this association, albeit not with the terrorist organization ISIS, will cause the viewers to view these companies in a bad

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