Boston journalist Emily Rooney responds to John Oliver’s profane insult
John Oliver has never been shy about tossing around coarse language, whether it’s directed at a politician or the entire year of 2016. But on Sunday’s episode of Last Week Tonight, the HBO host’s profanity had an unlikely target: WGBH journalist and Beat the Press host Emily Rooney.Sunday’s episode was a bit of a throwback, with Oliver returning to the topic that put his show on the map back in 2014: net neutrality. At the start of the segment, Oliver ran a June 2014 Beat the Press clip (below and NSFW, obviously) in which Rooney discussed Oliver’s rise from “relative obscurity” thanks to his net neutrality coverage.
John Oliver cursed out @EmilyRooneyWGBH and joked about “being negged” by @wgbh on his show last night. pic.twitter.com/K3hMiciuYs
— Kevin Slane (@kslane) May 8, 2017
“Last Week Tonight with John Oliver has languished in relative obscurity since its debut in April,” Rooney said in the clip. “But this week, an Oliver diatribe about net neutrality went viral.”
“Hey! F*** you, lady!” Oliver shouted when the clip ended, with a photo of Rooney in the upper left of the screen. “I didn’t languish in relative obscurity, I thrived in relative obscurity. ‘Relative obscurity’ is my middle name.”
When reached by phone, Rooney said that Oliver’s insult and complaint about “being negged by WGBH Boston” didn’t bother her at all.
“I thought it was funny,” Rooney said. “That’s just how he does things. That’s his schtick.”
Though Rooney didn’t mind being put on blast by Oliver, she did take issue with the fact that most people wouldn’t know that the 10-second soundbite Last Week producers chose to highlight was only the beginning of a lengthy, in-depth discussion on Beat the Press. In the segment, Rooney and Beat the Press panelists Joshua Benton, Callie Crossley, and Dan Kennedy gave Oliver a lot of credit for taking a complex issue like net neutrality and making it digestible for viewers.
“If you watch the whole segment, it was very flattering for [Oliver],” Rooney said. “But with social media, people just see that clip and his reaction and think that’s the whole story.”
You can watch the original Beat the Press segment below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMbcIkWqGYY
