Last night on Last Week Tonight, John Oliver devoted 35 minutes of his show to the funding crisis gripping public media channels across the country. As Oliver discusses, the attacks on public media are nothing new; in fact, Richard Nixon tried to cut the Corporation For Public Broadcasting’s funding just two years after its inception to pour more money into the Vietnam War. Oliver also shows Newt Gingrich in the ’90s complaining about it, and Marjorie Taylor Green earlier in 2025 calling PBS “un-American, anti-family, pro-crime fake news.”
Of course, the decades-long campaign finally got a major win earlier this year, when Republicans voted to cut $1.1 billion from PBS and NPR, affecting both national and local output. It’s a deficit that is going to be hard to fill, but Oliver is going to do his darndest to help. Toward the end of the segment, the host shared that the Last Week Tonight team wanted to auction off a Bob Ross painting to benefit public broadcasting, but quickly found that those were out of even their HBO budget. “But then we remembered, we’d 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,” says Oliver before taking us to the auction block.
Available at JohnOliversJunk.com, Oliver ends his segment running through the items, many of which should be familiar to fans of Last Week Tonight. Russell Crowe’s jockstrap from Cinderella Man, a cabbage Oliver married in a non-denominational ceremony in season nine, a giant bronzed set of Lyndon B. Johnson’s balls, and, yes, an original Bob Ross painting (thanks to the painter’s estate) are among the items for sale. All proceeds will go to the Public Media Bridge Fund.
