How easy is it to get a fake medical product featured on a local news station? As John Oliver demonstrated on the latest edition of Last Week Tonight on HBO, it’s far too easy.
During a 21-minute portion of his show focused on the tricky topic of sponsored content, Oliver revealed that he and the Last Week Tonight team started a company—Venus Inventions Inc.—and started touting “the world’s first sexual wellness blanket.” The blanket, notably, was “based on technology that doesn’t exist.”
Oliver and company even hired an actress to hawk the Venus Veil blanket and launched a website featuring made-up stats about it.
“Ideally, stations wouldn’t engage in this practice at all,” Oliver said around 15 minutes into the video above. “At the very least, their disclosures would be harder for viewers to miss and they’d do significantly more work to make sure that—if they are letting someone buy their way onto their channel and present something as real—it’s not, in fact, total nonsense. Because right now, it’s far too easy to make a ridiculous product that makes outlandish claims and get it onto local TV. And the reason I know that is we did.”
Oliver was able to get Venus Veil features inserted into three local outlets: ABC4 in Utah, KVUE in Texas, and Mile High Living in Colorado. As Oliver pointed out, it wasn’t very difficult to get some airtime for this “Nazi-era fuck blanket” despite it clearly a fake product. One of the Venus Veil appearances even included an in-studio interview, meaning the host was staring at what was clearly just a regular blanket.
“None of this was nearly difficult enough to get onto TV and it wasn’t even that expensive … It was all shockingly affordable and on some stations it didn’t even look that out of place,” Oliver said.
All told, Oliver and company spent a total of $7200 to bag the three local news appearances.
“The integrity of local news is crucially important and there is real harm for everyone if that integrity is damaged,” Oliver, who closed Sunday’s segment by calling out station owners, said.
