Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Late-Night Comedy: How Satire Became America’s Most Trusted News Source

Remote control in hand to change channels​.

Remote control in hand to change channels.

Getty Images, Stefano Madrigali

A close friend of mine recently confessed to having stopped watching cable news altogether because it was causing him and his wife anxiety and dread. They began watching Jimmy Kimmel instead, saying the nightly news felt like "psychological warfare" on their mental state. "We want to know what's going on but can't handle the relentless doom and gloom every night," he told me.

Jimmy Kimmel, host of ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live, seems to understand this shift. "A year ago, I would've said I'm hoping to show people who aren't paying attention to the news what's actually going on," he told Rolling Stone last month in an interview. "Now I see myself more as a place to scream."


This isn't surprising. For almost a decade now, the relationship between audiences and late-night hosts has changed profoundly. Viewers are tuning out cable news and seeking clarity, humor, and relief from late-night comedians like Stephen Colbert and Greg Gutfeld and the cold opens on SNL. On Bluesky, the buzzy new social platform for those fleeing Elon Musk's X, one user wrote, "It's ironic that I use satire shows as more reliable sources than the US mainstream media." For better or worse, this phenomenon has become a new form of journalism.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

How We Got Here

We didn't always turn to comedians for the headlines. For decades, late-night hosts Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, and even David Letterman at his most biting, still centered on celebrity interviews and innocuous zingers. The turning point came after 9/11 when Jon Stewart's emotional monologue on The Daily Show demonstrated that comedy could process national grief.

Following Trump's election in 2016, traditional news became more combative and chaotic. The nightly barrage of outrage left viewers emotionally exhausted. Therapists coined it: "Trump Anxiety Disorder." A recent Axios report found that the chaos surrounding Trump and the 2020 election contributed to a 10% rise in major health issues, including cancer and heart attacks.

In this increasingly tense political climate, liberal audiences found validation through shows like HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Real Time with Bill Maher, and NBC's Late Night with Seth Meyers' segment "A Closer Look". These programs offer viewers not just a recap of the news but a way to process it, laugh through it, and bear it. They tackle the most important stories of the day from the tariff wars, the Kilmar Abrego Garcia deportation case, and a potential Trump third term, all blurring the lines of comedy and journalism.

The Numbers Tell the Story

The popularity of this approach is evident in the ratings. Shows from Colbert, Kimmel, and Gutfeld often outperform traditional cable news in their respective timeframes. For instance, on April 17, Gutfeld! captured 3,177,000 viewers at 10 p.m., significantly outperforming CNN's Abby Phillip (527,000 viewers) and MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell (1,643,000 viewers) in the same slot. This performance has established Gutfeld as the dominant voice in late-night ratings.

For conservative viewers, long feeling alienated by mainstream comedy, the rise of Greg Gutfeld—the former Fox News host turned late-night comedian—and his late-night show Gutfeld! wasn't about offering traditional late-night laughs, it was about providing conservative viewers a late-night space where their frustrations were acknowledged with humor, not shame. His success highlights how late-night comedy has evolved into ideological echo chambers that reinforce our worldviews, signaling a profound shift in how we consume political information today.

The Trade-Off

Yet, while comedians offer us a news style that relieves the stress of traditional reporting, it's important to remember they are not journalists. John Oliver, host of HBO's Last Week Tonight, describes his broadcast bluntly: "It's not journalism. It's comedy first, comedy second." It's true that their job is to entertain first, but it's also clear they do a kind of journalism that engages and connects with us in ways traditional news no longer can. The balance we strike is revealing: we choose comfort over journalistic credibility.

Conclusion: Emotional Survival Over News Accuracy

Mainstream news has stopped working for many Americans. That's why late-night comedy, for all its irreverence and partisan leanings, is doing what we once expected journalism to do: tell the truth, make it understandable, and offer us a sense of understanding and comfort.

Meanwhile, with news channels pushing viewers into opposing camps, comedians have become one of the few places where people still gather, night after night, for some much-needed catharsis. But whether you agree with their politics or not, they have become the voices Americans turn to when the world stops making sense. They remind us that we're not crazy, and in a country where the truth can sound like a joke, the last laugh belongs to those who can still help us make sense of it all.

Jack Rico is an entertainment journalist, TV host, and media pundit with over two decades of experience covering Latinos in media and entertainment. He was recently featured on ABC News' primetime special Latinos in Hollywood and is the co-host of the Webby-nominated podcast Brown & Black.

Read More

Closeup of Software engineering team engaged in problem-solving and code analysis

Closeup of Software engineering team engaged in problem-solving and code analysis.

Getty Images, MTStock Studio

AI Is Here. Our Laws Are Stuck in the Past.

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises a future once confined to science fiction: personalized medicine accounting for your specific condition, accelerated scientific discovery addressing the most difficult challenges, and reimagined public education designed around AI tutors suited to each student's learning style. We see glimpses of this potential on a daily basis. Yet, as AI capabilities surge forward at exponential speed, the laws and regulations meant to guide them remain anchored in the twentieth century (if not the nineteenth or eighteenth!). This isn't just inefficient; it's dangerously reckless.

For too long, our approach to governing new technologies, including AI, has been one of cautious incrementalism—trying to fit revolutionary tools into outdated frameworks. We debate how century-old privacy torts apply to vast AI training datasets, how liability rules designed for factory machines might cover autonomous systems, or how copyright law conceived for human authors handles AI-generated creations. We tinker around the edges, applying digital patches to analog laws.

Keep ReadingShow less
Nurturing the Next Generation of Journalists
man using MacBook Air

Nurturing the Next Generation of Journalists

“Student journalists are uniquely positioned to take on the challenges of complicating the narrative about how we see each other, putting forward new solutions to how we can work together and have dialogue across difference,” said Maxine Rich, the Program Manager with Common Ground USA. I had the chance to interview her earlier this year about Common Ground Journalism, a new initiative to support students reporting in contentious times.

A partnership with The Fulcrum and the Latino News Network (LNN), I joined Maxine and Nicole Donelan, Program Assistant with Common Ground USA, as co-instructor of the first Common Ground Journalism cohort, which ran for six weeks between January and March 2025.

Keep ReadingShow less
Project 2025’s Media Agenda: The Executive Order Threatens NPR and PBS
NPR headquarters | James Cridland | Flickr

Project 2025’s Media Agenda: The Executive Order Threatens NPR and PBS

President Donald Trump signed an executive order late Thursday evening to eliminate federal funding for NPR and PBS. The order directs the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and other agencies to cease both direct and indirect public financing for these public broadcasters.

In a social media post, the administration defended the decision, asserting that NPR and PBS "receive millions from taxpayers to spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as 'news.’" The executive order argues that government-funded media is outdated and unnecessary, claiming it compromises journalistic independence.

Keep ReadingShow less
The Biggest Obstacle to Safer Roads Isn't Technology, It's Politics

A 3D generated image of modern vehicles with AI assistance.

Getty Images, gremlin

The Biggest Obstacle to Safer Roads Isn't Technology, It's Politics

Let’s be honest: does driving feel safe anymore? Ask anyone navigating the daily commute, especially in notoriously chaotic places like Miami, and you’ll likely hear a frustrated, perhaps even expletive-laden, "No!" That gut feeling isn't paranoia; it's backed by grim statistics. Over 200 people died on Travis County roads in 2023, according to Vision Zero ATX. Nationally, tens of thousands perish in preventable crashes. It's a relentless public health crisis we've somehow numbed ourselves to, with a staggering cost measured in shattered families and lost potential.

But imagine a different reality, one where that daily fear evaporates. What if I told you that the technology to dramatically reduce this carnage isn't science fiction but sitting right under our noses? Autonomous vehicles (AVs), or self-driving cars, are here and rapidly improving. Leveraging breakthroughs in AI, these vehicles are increasingly outperforming human drivers, proving to be significantly less likely to cause accidents, especially those resulting in injury. Studies suggest that replacing human drivers with AVs could drastically cut road fatalities. Even achieving just 10% AV penetration on our roads might improve traffic safety by as much as 50%, with those gains likely to grow exponentially as the technology becomes more sophisticated and widespread.

Keep ReadingShow less