John Oliver referred to as out the media for putting an excessive amount of belief in police when reporting on crime tales ― resulting in a two-word phrase heard regularly on TV information: “police say.”
“Yeah, ‘police say,‘” Oliver stated. “It’s a phrase that you constantly hear from the mouths of news reporters. It’s right up there with ‘this just in,’ or ‘back to you,’ or ‘I apologize for the actions I did on Cinco de Mayo.’”
He stated whereas official police accounts are vital to protection of crime, information experiences typically merely repeat a police press launch.
And that may turn into an enormous mistake, he stated, for one easy motive.
“Police lie,” Oliver stated bluntly. “And they lie a lot.”
He recapped a few of the tales on “Last Week Tonight” through the years.
“They lie to get search warrants to conduct raids and to get confessions during interrogations,” he stated. “And they even lie under oath, so often in fact here in New York it came to be known as ‘testilying.’”
That means the phrase of the police needs to be handled with “immense skepticism” by the media, he argued. And Oliver had the receipts, with some real-world examples of cops providing what he referred to as “complete horseshit” to the media: