Olivers abound on Sunday when former CNN media beat writer Oliver Darcy took to his media-industry newsletter to puff up late night comedian John Oliver. Darcy praised the effort and research Oliver and his team of producers at Last Week Tonight put into each episode. But one massive recent development for Oliver was the unaddressed gorilla in the room: the defamation suit against him and the production company. A defamation suit that allegedly stemmed from poor research and the manipulation of audio.

Darcy kicked off his puff piece by specifically highlighting Oliver and Co.’s “deep dives into complex” topics:

John Oliver has spent the past decade turning late-night television into a vehicle for hard-hitting journalism. On “Last Week Tonight,” he and his team take deep dives into complex, often uncomfortable topics—policing, immigration, authoritarianism, etcetera—packaging them with enough humor to make the bitter pills easier to swallow.

As NewsBusters previously reported, an official complaint filed with the United States Southern District of New York alleged that Oliver and his producers “knowingly manipulated” the sworn testimony of Dr. Brian Morley, “and then knowingly manipulated the context” of the testimony.

The interview, which was “lightly edited for style,” started with Darcy wondering how Oliver managed to “inject humor in the segments” (bold add by Darcy to denote his questions, non-bolded text is Oliver’s answers):

You cover a lot of serious topics on “Last Week Tonight"—from policing and immigration detentions to authoritarianism—yet you find ways to inject humor into the segments. How do you approach that delicate balance of serious and funny?

It’s definitely something we think about a lot. Whether we strike the right balance is obviously subjective; I hope the jokes make some of the more complicated, or depressing material we’re presenting slightly easier to stomach, but if they make it worse, I sincerely apologize!

That purported humor by Oliver included this line seemingly promoting a violent sexual assault of Morley: “Fuck that doctor with a rusty canoe. I hope he gets tetanus of the balls.”

Darcy’s puff piece may have ultimately done more harm than good for his subject. When asking about what went into their research process, Oliver explained:

It’s very intense. We’re generally working on each story for 6 weeks, calling experts and trying to shape the piece before we even think about writing jokes. We learned that the hard way early on, when jokes we loved got killed after research came in and demolished the underlying facts. Now we try to make sure that, to the extent possible, we’re writing jokes on solid foundations.

Adding: “We really do see this as a comedy show. To the extent that we feel ‘responsibility,’ it’s to get the story right.”

But as the defamation suit alleged, Oliver and his producers ignored the facts and manipulated audio to create a false narrative.

In the story in question, Oliver played a soundbite of Morley’s testimony before a Medicaid hearing and was accompanied by an on-screen graphic showing the purported quote:

People have bowel movements every day where they don’t completely clean themselves, and we don’t fuss over [them] too much. People are allowed to be dirty … You know, I would allow him to be a little dirty for a couple of days.

Following the soundbite, Oliver declared: “when I first heard that, I thought that had to be taken out of context. There is no way a doctor, a licensed physician, would testify in a hearing that he thinks it’s okay if people have shit on them for days.” He then admitted that “we got the full hearing” but “I’m not going to play it for you.” “I’m just gonna tell you: [Morley] said it, he meant it,” Oliver claimed.

The reason Oliver probably didn’t want to share Morley’s full comments was because what the show was claiming was apparently a lie, according to the filing. The filing showed Morley’s full comments and argued that Oliver’s producers chopped up what he said, and how the hearing wasn’t remotely about what they claimed it was.

In the sub-headline, Darcy touted that Oliver was “not holding back in an increasingly hostile political climate.” Some of that hostility was apparently coming from Oliver himself.