{"id":384989,"date":"2025-11-17T10:24:16","date_gmt":"2025-11-17T10:24:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/384989\/"},"modified":"2025-11-17T10:24:16","modified_gmt":"2025-11-17T10:24:16","slug":"john-oliver-last-week-tonight-auction-to-support-public-broadcasting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/384989\/","title":{"rendered":"John Oliver ‘Last Week Tonight’ Auction to Support Public Broadcasting"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tJohn Oliver<\/a> tackled the Trump Administration\u2019s defunding of public media for his final \u201cLast Week Tonight\u201d episode of 2025, detailing how the decision to eliminate $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting earlier this year has severely impacted radio and TV stations, particularly in rural areas. So Oliver and \u201cLast Week Tonight\u201d are doing their part to help: The show has launched an auction website, John Oliver\u2019s Junk<\/a>, where 65 items are currently up for bid \u2014 including an original 1987 painting by late PBS<\/a> icon Bob Ross<\/a>, \u201cCabin at Sunset,\u201d which at press time was fetching $51,000.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe idea for the auction actually came from the Bob Ross estate, which recently sold three Ross original paintings at auction to support public broadcasting, raising $662,000.<\/p>\n

\n\tOliver announced the \u201cJohn Oliver\u2019s Junk\u201d auction on Sunday\u2019s show, and said the auction would continue through Nov. 24. \u201cWe\u2019ve actually accumulated a bunch of weird artifacts on this show over the years that we could definitely auction off to raise some much needed money,\u201d Oliver said. \u201cI am proud to announce last week tonight\u2019s first ever auction in aid of public media. This is real!\u201d Proceeds go to the Public Media Bridge Fund,\u00a0which is assisting local public broadcasters in temporarily finding new funds in the wake of the CPB closure.<\/p>\n

\n\tRELATED:<\/strong> PBS CEO Reveals Plan to Save Stations and Programming After Trump Killed Funding, Admits There\u2019s No \u2018White Knight That Will Save Us\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tFans of \u201cLast Week Tonight\u201d will recognize several of the items being auctioned: Among them, Russell Crowe\u2019s jock strap (\u201cworn by Russell Crowe in the major motion picture Cinderella Man and later purchased by \u2018Last Week Tonight with John Oliver<\/a>,\u2019 during season 5 of the show, as part of Crowe\u2019s \u2018Art of Divorce; auction in which Crowe sold his personal belongings to pay for his divorce\u201d), and \u201cMrs. Cabbage Oliver\u201d (\u201cJohn Oliver\u2019s on-screen wife, married during an on-screen wedding officiated by Steve Buscemi. Part of \u2018Last Week Tonight\u2019s\u2019 season 9 segment on AI-generated art in which John marries a cabbage in the studio\u201d).<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\n\tAlso: A large, gold-plated re-creation of President Lyndon B. Johnson\u2019s balls (\u201cSculpture of President Lyndon B. Johnson\u2019s scrotum, part of the season 12 segment on presidential libraries\u201d), five wax Presidents of the United States, golden Adidas sneakers (\u201cGold sneakers John Oliver promised to wear in a season 2 episode of \u2018Last Week Tonight with John Oliver\u2019 if scandal-ridden FIFA President Sepp Blatter stepped down\u201d).<\/p>\n

\n\tAmong other items: A trip to New York to meet Oliver; \u201ca case of Cabernet SauvignJohn, a wine years in the making by \u2018Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,’\u201d and a chance to appear in a photo over Oliver\u2019s shoulder during an episode \u2014 along with two VIP tickets to a live taping of the show.<\/p>\n

\n\tOliver\u2019s \u201cCommunity\u201d colleague Joel McHale also appeared in the episode, which featured a flashback to when McHale hosted a pledge drive for Seattle\u2019s PBS station in 1999 \u2014 and couldn\u2019t stop talking about \u201cMr. Bean.\u201d To commemorate that, McHale has signed a DVD set of \u201cMr. Bean\u201d episodes, which is also being auctioned.<\/p>\n

\n\tOliver spent much of Sunday\u2019s episode discussing public broadcasting\u2019s predicament: \u201cPublic media has been truly innovative in reaching underserved audiences. It was public TV station that first invented closed captioning in the 1970s. Stations around the country offer programming in Haitian, Creole, Navajo, Vietnamese and many other languages. But as you undoubtedly know, it is now facing a serious threat, as over the summer, Congress decided to eliminate $1.1 billion that have been allocated to fund public broadcasting for the next two years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOliver took on how Republicans have attacked public media since almost the moment that President Johnson first signed the law putting the CPB into existence, and he explained how criticism of a \u201cliberal bias\u201d inside public media is really about something else: \u201cthere can be a good faith debate over bias in the media, liberal or otherwise, but I\u2019ll point out that a lot of the time, what conservatives claim as \u2018liberal bias\u2019 is often just things like showing there\u2019s a long history of racism in America, or that gay people exist \u2014 making it hard to interpret those criticisms as anything other than bigotry. And yet, arguments like those just got used to justify zeroing out the entire budget of the CPB.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOliver also noted the irony that by cutting budgets, local stations will now have to rely more on national content coming out of major markets like New York, instead of producing vital local community programming. \u201cThe irony is, the more local stations budgets are slashed, the more they may come to rely on programming produced in those urban echo chambers. As the executive director of a station in California said, the local stuff that\u2019s so important to people is probably the stuff that will go away.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOliver noted that public radio and TV stations have been behind vital local investigative reporting in areas where there are few other media outlets. And \u201cLast Week Tonight\u201d has relied on public reporting for pieces it has done on subjects such as HOAs, juvenile justice and lethal injection.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPublic Media can be how critical information gets disseminated in communities with limited broadband or cell service,\u201d he said. \u201cPublic Radio may be the only way to distribute missing and endangered persons alerts. It can also be crucial during an emergency like a hurricane.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cFrankly, it\u2019s always been a bit weird how little we fund public media, given how vital it can be. Here in the U.S., public media is a global outlier in how little federal funding it receives. Even before these cuts, federal spending amounted to less than $1.60 per capita \u2014 compared to countries like Norway, Sweden and the UK, which devote nearly $100 or more,\u201d he added. \u201cAnd research shows a positive correlation between the strength of public media systems and the health of democracies\u2026. We\u2019d ideally work on a long term fix for the way the CPB is funded. And instead of giving Congress the power to take its money away every two years, we\u2019d institute some kind of tax or licensing fee that could reliably fund it. That is something people have been recommending since the CPB was first created. Sadly, we do not live in that universe right now and until we do, public media is in a dire situation now.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"John Oliver tackled the Trump Administration\u2019s defunding of public media for his final \u201cLast Week Tonight\u201d episode of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":384990,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[147207,171,53747,54940,23967,173,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-384989","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-bob-ross","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-john-oliver","11":"tag-last-week-tonight-with-john-oliver","12":"tag-pbs","13":"tag-tv","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115564555370636281","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=384989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/384990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=384989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=384989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=384989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}