HBO’s cheap rent-a-clown John Oliver — whose delivery is about as funny as a tax audit — made one of the dumbest attempts to excuse a George Soros-controlled radio station unmasking undercover ICE agents conducting operations in gang-infested San Jose, California.
Oliver lashed out at FCC Chairman Brendan Carr during his Sunday show for daring to investigate KCBS 740 AM anchor Bret Burkhart after he gave exact descriptions and makes of the vehicles ICE agents were reportedly using, including specific locations on January 26.
Oliver based his reporting on alerts from the leftist Rapid Response Network, a community-based group which fights against deportation initiatives. After replaying the clip of Burkhart’s asinine report, Oliver squawked: “But, crucially: That report's also pretty basic. I.C.E. was in the community, community groups and government officials were talking about it, and local news covered it.” Oliver even jested that Burkhart had a “remarkably soothing voice for a news report describing something as alarming as I.C.E. agents in unmarked vehicles.”
Oliver "humorously" compared ICE agents to a tiger that mauls humans. He can't imagine illegal aliens that have mauled humans to death.
What Oliver glossed over was that Burkhart’s reporting mentioned that ICE agents were “currently carrying out an operation on the East Side of town,” indicating that the agents were still in the general vicinity of East San Jose when their vehicles were doxxed. To quote Disney comic relief character Zazu whom Oliver voiced in the CGI-remake of The Lion King (2019), the comedian’s brain-dead argument was tantamount to him having “slammed his head into trees, and” his beak wasn’t “built for it. He was concussed regularly!”
Oliver’s evidence to downplay Burkhart’s nutty reporting as much ado about nothing? Rapid Response Network’s 3:30 pm update that ICE agents had supposedly left one of the reported locations (Target on Story Road) “two hours” before the KCBS segment ran. That was it.
Two problems immediately present themselves:
1. There’s no way to know if the local RRN’s update on Facebook was accurate and it doesn’t mean that the vehicles that Burkhart specified weren’t still within close or general proximity to the identified area during their operation. NewsNation reported January 27 that agents were also spotted near Capitol Park around that time, just about 1.1 miles from the Target on Story Road.
2. Giving the specific vehicle identifications of undercover ICE vehicles could have subjected them and any citizens who own the same vehicles to threat from any gang activity anywhere within East San Jose, which is notoriously a hotbed for violence.
Did Oliver consider any of that? Nope. He instead launched a tirade against Carr for suggesting during a Fox News Channel appearance that Burkhart was “broadcasting the live location, identifying the unmarked vehicles that [ICE agents] were in” and that he was investigating accordingly. Oliver then had a meltdown:
What are you talking about? Covering stories like that is literally the whole point of local news radio. That and delivering the driest imaginable ad read for a local deck-staining company. Now, legal scholars will tell you, this FCC investigation is also meritless. As one First Amendment expert put it, ‘Law enforcement operations, immigration or otherwise, are matters of public interest.’ So if it comes to a court case, and KCBS chooses to fight, it'll almost certainly win. But it's a little worrying that so far, they haven't openly defended their journalists -- who, again, did absolutely nothing wrong.
Now, Oliver has no idea if KCBS would actually win such a case, since publicly unmasking undercover federal agents and subjecting them to real life harm could definitely be argued to not be proper service to the public interest. But to dismiss the matter entirely as if nothing was done wrong is just the epitome of stupidity, which would suit his brand well anyway since he pays his nut by being a dry-bar comic in the Bozo-the-Clown business in Hollywood.
Soros purchased $400 million, or a 40 percent stake, of the bankrupt Audacy in February 2024. Notably, Audacy, which is America’s second biggest radio company, features or streams at least 16 powerful 50,000-watt radio stations, which means that their coverage is especially widespread. KCBS 740 AM was one of the stations prominently implicated in that deal. The Federal Communications Commission, in a bizarre act, fast-tracked Soros’s purchase of the radio giant, which was also backed by foreign money.
