You know you can stop posting to this thread any time you want, right? This thread would have died last October if you didn’t keep bumping it with updates on whatever he said in his latest show.
(a) Sure, but I do it to support the idea that the show has value. Otherwise this thread would have been an (almost) unequivocal condemnation of both Maher and his show. Most of us sometimes feel the need to promote fairness where we see excessive bias.
(b) I’m not the only one who’s been bumping the thread.
a) Maher is a self-important bore, and has been for years. Others pointing that out isn’t really bias, they just don’t like how he behaves.
b) Just because others make mistakes doesn’t mean you have to perpetuate them.
He has always been that way and it’s why I’ve never been able to stand him.
That being said, everyone has different tastes and I don’t have anything against @wolfpup for feeling differently.
Fuck. You.
There is nothing hyperbolic about those correctly applied labels.
People like you, willing to let the small shit slide, are a big reason we still live in a rape culture. Get fucked.
As someone else said, then don’t feel obligated, it’s a pitting, the audience is not here for balanced coverage (though I did enjoy the bit Mijin brought up about the AG).
“You don’t stay on a show for 22 years and be a pompous asshole.”
Bill O’Reilly.
Of course, that has been true literally forever, this is not a great insight/
- “These kids are more violent when their team wins a championship”. Or when they lose one. I still remember the Vancouver hockey riots.
This was sloppy to the point of misleading analysis. His argument was that since only a miniscule number of people got arrested and there was more violence after a hockey game then at the protests that college students care more about Hocky than Gaza. This misses the point that most of the protests were non-violent, at least until the police came it, that the number of students arrested was a small fraction of those who participated, and that the number who participated was a small fraction of those who shared the sentifment. I students set up week long protests and disrupted graduations because of a Hockey game he might have had a point, or if instead he pointed out that focusing on the violence was a mischaracterization of the larger movement. But instead he also focused on the violence and used it to discount the movement.
- If the headlines in your preferred media feature words like “shreds”, “destroys”, “pummels”, “bashes” … your outlet is a partisan piece of shit. Either that or you’re reading a Batman comic.
Again, media has used active words in headlines since forever, and word choice seems to me to be pretty small pickings as far as criticism.
- Any news source that cites “the internet” or “Twitter says” are a bunch of hacks too lazy to do real journalism.
Finally, something Maher and I completely %100 agree on. Blind squirrels and all that.
- If your news outlet consistently reduces everything that happens in the world to who the US president is, get rid of it. It’s just thoughtless reflexive team politics.
I know that Fox news does this, everything bad that happens is Biden’s fault, but do other agencies? I mostly see this sort of criticism coming from sloppy thinking on social media. When its done on mainstream media it seems to be more in terms of the election horse race, ( e.g. how will the economy affect Biden chances). But maybe thats because I mainly get my news from the Jamaica fetishists.
- Once the news became the profit division of media companies, they stopped being in the news business and are now in the audience-stroking business; the goal is no longer to inform opinions, it’s to reinforce them. Walter Cronkite used to say “that’s the way it is”. Now it’s “that’s our story and we’re sticking to it”.
Again, nothing new to see here.
Never trust initial reports. The media cares way more about being first than about being right. He cites the initial reports about the Columbine shootings: “they got everything right except for all of it”.
Probably good advice, but if you have to go back over 24 years to get a good example, its probably not a pervasive problem as you are making it out to be.
Not sure how I mixed that up in my mind. But in any case it is still, figure out something that you think stereotypical, pie in the sky liberal might say and then assign it to a stereotypical liberal news organization, knowing that so long as it sounds good your minions will eat it up.
Yep, and that remains my main issue with Maher.
To try to “both sides” everything, he’ll fixate on something one person said once, misinterpret it, and then claim it’s something all the left believes. Or sometimes he’ll blame all the woke for the American right becoming lunatics.
Before a certain pup runs in to defend again; I’m not saying this to pile on. Maher is funny sometimes and I give him credit for good takes sometimes (as I did upthread). But he does engage in a lot of stuff that’s intellectually dishonest or lazy. And I wasn’t even aware of all the defences of sex criminals.
Feels very “cancel culture-y” to me.
I only casually watch his show from time to time so I’m not going to be Bull Maher’s advocate. But I generally associate him with being left of center but equally willing to criticize the left extreme as he is the right. And that seemed to be what his core audience liked about him.
But apparently he must have crossed some line with some jokes or positions he’s taken or some behavior in his personal life because it seems like all these nobody video blogger influencer types have taken to their feeds to lambast him.
I only know this because of all the videos I had to weed through to find the Bill Maher vs Bill Burr conversation (as opposed to videos of people just commenting about them).
Plus he keeps inviting Ann Coulter. One would think that’s unnecessary by now.
Yes, I can certainly see the comic value of lamenting that the Gaza demonstrations are not riots.
I haven’t seen this commented on, and I think it’s worth highlighting.
The fact that HBO continues to support Maher is not necessarily a mark of quality. Popularity is not the same thing as excellence.
I continue to agree with wolfpup that Maher’s show can be worth watching when he hosts right-wing thinkers capable of more than merely repeating their side’s tired talking points. I don’t think this happens as often as wolfpup may believe–for me, some of Maher’s shows are just a waste of time, because the guests are (in my view) not arguing in good faith. Or maybe one guest is trying to argue in good faith but neither that guest nor Maher are willing to really engage with the one who isn’t. (Recent examples: Kellyanne Conway, Piers Morgan, Nancy Mace, and Ann Coulter.)
And I do agree with those who dislike and deplore Maher’s “hard on the left” schtick, which is too often unfair in the ways several have mentioned. Particularly annoying is his ‘pick one fringe example and pretend it characterizes the entire Left’ pattern.
I’m also less than enthusiastic about another Maher habit recently discussed here: his frequent defenses of white men credibly accused of sexual aggression (or worse) against unwilling targets. He’s gotten quite predictable on this score.
I wouldn’t call for HBO to drop him.
But I would like to see him used more openly and more frequently as an example of ‘bad argumentation tactics and patterns.’ He’s provided us with so many cases in point that it’s a shame to waste him.
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ETA: a very useful page:
I disagree with Maher and don’t like him, but he’s not dangerous or a monster or anything. He’s not Alex Jones. My attitude is that if people don’t like him, don’t watch his show (and I don’t).
It’s not schtick, that’s his persoanlity.
It obviously does.
Bill Maher is making things worse.
Good. Cancelling Bill Maher would be a good thing. More “cancel culture” please.
I was upset that they played a whole episode on CNN. He is a clown. He is entertainment.
He is Not News.
But a lot of that is my anger with CNN for continuing to try to drag the network towards the right.
I agree.
But (and I doubt you’ll object to this) it’s still important to point out his bad argumentation tactics*, as is happening in this thread, because he’s influential.
*Yes, he’s a comedian. But in addition to trying to get laughs, he’s trying to get applause. He’s nearly always arguing in favor of some position he holds.
I think it’s both. I think it comes naturally to him and he leans into it. It’s like a naturally silly person doing comedy; they will crank it up all the way for entertainment purposes but aren’t like that 24/7.
Definitely not objecting, I’m also someone calling him a shithead.
It definitely is not, I agree, but when the network that’s supported you for nearly a quarter of a century and continues to do so is one that has built its brand and reputation on the quality of its original programming, that’s not something that’s easily dismissed. HBO is not Fox News.
Your whole post is thoughtful and my disagreement is not so much with the general sentiment of it as with degree and nuance. I realize this list of four examples is not supposed to be exhaustive, but Bill Maher has had literally thousands of guests over the decades and you listed four that you think argue in bad faith, and of those four, I think only two are really valid.
Kellyanne Conway of course cannot argue in good faith because she’s a shill for the Orange Turd. I think Maher only has her on because he enjoys toying with her absurd pro-Trump shilling. The “serious information” aspect here, such as it is, is to demonstrate how Trump acolytes think, and to push back on it. Ann Coulter, meanwhile, has never made a good-faith argument in her life. She’s a professional provocateur.
But Piers Morgan is just an intellectually shallow dipshit, and Nancy Mace is a typical slimy politician. If Maher wasn’t allowed to have slimy politicians on the show, he wouldn’t have a show. And BTW, the same show that had Mace on the panel also had Ro Khanna, Democratic Congressman from California who is the very model of an ethical, progressive politician. Which brings me to the following point.
You linked to an article listing all 22 years of Real Time episodes and all the guests that have appeared on the show. I don’t know what you get out of it, but what I see is that the vast majority are thoughtful influencers, authors, politicians, and other individuals whose opinions are worth hearing. There is also a smaller number of outspoken lunatics which I regard somewhat like interesting spices in a stew – you’d never consume the spices by themselves, and in quantity they might even be toxic, but they keep the stew from being bland. Flawed analogies aside, these lunatics are not meant to be taken seriously by Maher’s audience.
I acknowledge that Robert F Kennedy Jr is somewhat of an exception here, and that’s a problem. In fairness to Maher, he did push back on RFK Jr’s most outrageous claims in a recent interview, but he didn’t push back nearly enough. Maher’s cynical attitude toward vaccines and medical science in general is indeed one of his big problems, but there’s an old saying about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
My whole point here all along is that even with its flaws, the show has value.
Sadly for you, HBO recently renewed Real Time for another two years. It will now run until at least the end of 2026. It’s typically been renewed two years at a time, so it will likely be renewed again at that point.