HBO host John Oliver pushed back on News Corp founder Rupert Murdoch over a 2016 article in The Times UK.
During a guest appearance on Monday night’s Late Night with Seth Meyers, Oliver reacted to the article, calling for Murdoch to “go f*ck himself.”
“I would assume you were sort of like, you know, a favorite son, back in the UK,” Meyers joked.
“Oh no,” Oliver replied.
“This is an article from The Times. This big newspaper,” Meyers said.
“Big newspaper. Yeah, Murdoch owns [it] so he can go f*ck himself,” Oliver said.
Meyers proceeded to show Oliver a headline from the 2016 article, which branded him “the British comedy failure who makes America laugh.”
“I didn’t know that headline was coming. I knew an article was coming cause they’d said like, ‘Would you like to do an interview for this?’ And I thought it’ll be on the front page of like the culture supplement at The Times. I thought, that’d be great. It’ll be a nice surprise for my parents,” Oliver laughed.
“I had a conversation with this journalist, like an hour and a half felt like — this has gone quite well. I think we’ve kind of hit it off. I don’t think I’ve said anything that’s not gonna look bad in print,” he recalled.
“I was actually looking forward to it coming out and then that was the headline. The British people are just absolute black belts at passive aggression and that really feels like it’s a compliment, really wrapped in concrete enforced insults,” Oliver laughed.
Watch above via Late Night with Seth Meyers.
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