Did SNL really help produce media change?

March 5, 2008

A couple of weeks ago, as most of the political world knows by now, “Saturday Night Live” did a skit mocking the perception that news outlets were tougher on Hillary Clinton than Barack Obama. The Clinton campaign loved the skit, promoted it heavily, and Clinton began referencing it frequently, including in a nationally televised debate.

But could one skit — which, if ratings are any indication, was watched live by a small percentage of the population — really have a significant impact? Apparently, so. The NYT reported today that this one comedic bit shook up quite a few journalists.

Over the last few days, the tone of the Democratic contest seems to have shifted, with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign more buoyant and Senator Barack Obama’s more defensive.

That shift may be traceable in part to the “Saturday Night Live” show on Feb. 23, when, back from the writers’ strike, it mocked the news media for treating Mr. Obama more gently than it treated Mrs. Clinton.

Mrs. Clinton amplified that view later in a debate, and her aides stoked it all week, practically browbeating reporters.

Now comes evidence that the publicizing by the Clinton campaign and the news media may have helped flip the coverage as it questioned Mr. Obama more aggressively…. “Saturday Night Live” thrust itself into the relative vacuum, portraying the news media as swooning over Mr. Obama and badgering Mrs. Clinton. Her campaign grabbed the pop-culture moment and stoked the idea.

The wording of that last paragraph is a little ambiguous, but it sounds as if the SNL skit was so effective in touching a nerve, the media coverage changed its coverage of the candidates as a result.

If so, this strikes me as more than a little silly.

I think TNR’s Michelle Cottle got this exactly right.

Seriously? Can this possibly be true? I fear it is, and it makes me wonder why journalists are such pathetic dogs. Scold us, and we immediately go into a shame-faced crouch, start lashing ourselves like medieval monks, and become desperate to win back your approval. You are absolutely right: we were too soft on Bush in 2000; we got suckered into backing the Iraq war; we fixate on the horse-race aspects of elections instead of delivering you hours and hours and pages and pages of insightful policy analysis; every last one of us is a card-caring liberal; we care nothing for the truth and will repeat any old rumor that comes down the pipeline without regard to whether there’s any reason to believe it’s true; and, given our druthers, we would print nothing but naked pictures of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, preferably wrestling one another in a pit of chocolate pudding. For all this and much, much more, we are so very very sorry. Just please stop being mean to us. We’ll do anything. Seriously. We only want to be loved.

Gag. Hating the media is a great American pastime — like hating lawyers and politicians…. Forget snuggling up to Obama. If the media can’t take some gentle late-night ribbing without going all to pieces, that is the real embarrassment.

Quite right.

a little silly perhaps, but not unprecedented. I remember a skit SNL did during the first gulf war where the reporters were spoofed for asking questions about the progress of the war, and the location of troop support. The skit was so over the top, but so well received by the public, that the administration took it upon themselves to operate in a media vacuum and began freezing out reporting on the military.

  • Let me get this straight, while any number of blogs have enumerated and lambasted countless instances of the ludicrously biased “journalistic reporting” of Matthews, Russert, and all the rest; this single skit by SNL embarrassed them into pretending to do their jobs? Well, that’s too nice, they were embarrassed into doing a Foxy Fair’N’Balanced act.

    Please, somebody call Lorne Michaels and link him to all the material at CB, truthout, TPM, ThinkProgress, etc. If he has indeed embarrassed them, he needs to do it some more.

  • Nonsense! This self-flagellation by the media is as disingenuous as the “liberal media” theme. If they were interested in doing a little self reflection, they might do a little vetting of John McCain. This whole effort is nothing more than another attempt to help him.

  • The media doesn’t get paid to feel embarassment. You might as well look for an embarrassed hooker in Amsterdam.

    Make no mistake, they get paid to keep the horse race going. And they’ve figured out how to do it.

  • I think SNL embarrassed the MSM by making plain how biased they had become.

    But the MSM will be back with a vengeance against Hillary, because that’s the only way they can recover from being embarrassed by SNL.

    What a country!

  • And we’re all confident that when Obama or Clinton points out how easy the media has been on McCain, that there will be a sea change in his coverage.

  • I think SNL embarrassed the MSM by making plain how biased they had become. -S1

    Well, the certainly weren’t giving Obama a free ride, but I’m weary of pointing out why to people who simply don’t care to observe facts.

    I’ll simply ask when was the last time Hillary was ‘mistakenly’ referred to by the name of the terrorist mastermind behind 9/11?

    Oh, never.

    Then, Hillary can shut the fuck up about bias. Everything the media has said about her, she deserves because of her dirty, Rovian campaign. You can ask Mr. Lifetime of Experience all about it.

  • Word of note, Steve — as someone who used to write for a comedy sketch troupe, the term “skit” is about as un-PC as calling a a “Trekker” and “Trekkie”. And equally inane. But, I wanted to let you in on the lingo.

  • Glenn Greenwald had a recent post about this that I think got it exactly right. The media doesn’t really care about accusations about snuggling up to politicians, at least not when those politicians have an (R) after their name, certainly not when those politicians are named George W. Bush or John McCain. It’s just IOKIYAR again.

  • The media is a reflection of what America wants. If we didn’t buy more snappy-doddles during the puddin’ wrestling then policy analysis they wouldn’t give it so much time. The media has become lazy, because we have become lazy.

    Want to run a story about McCain’s coziness with lobbyists, it had better have some flair, like a mistress, or no one will care that McCain is doing favor for a lobbyist.

    The media is screwing the pooch and only a small fraction of the population cares, and for the most part they are getting their info from the blogs, so why would MSM do what you are asking, what is their motivation. There isn’t any. Well unless SNL tells it viewers that Hillary is being mistreated, cause if SNL said it must be fact.

    Have we really hit a point in time when a satire skit is viewed with more believability then the underlying story. Fricken pathetic.

  • Trekkers are “Trekkies.” They also don’t bathe regularly.

    (Roll eyes.)

    Straight from the patoot who doesn’t think mercury is toxic.

  • I don’t think Clinton on SNL is making the media change their tune about her. I think what’s making the media change their tune about her is the fact that they want this to be a race for as long as possible. Their collective nipples are exploding over the idea that this is going to go all the way to the convention.

    I think that, for a small-but-significant group of voters, seeing Hillary on SNL made them rethink their opinions of her. It’s been said by many that Clinton, up close and personal and on her own, is much more charming and personable than the media and her political opponents made her out to be. While her comic timing isn’t in Amy Poehler territory (let’s not lie, it’s not even in Melanie Hutsell territory), it wasn’t the shrill overbearing Hillary Clinton everyone’s constantly told is the only the Hillary Clinton there really is. It’s sad that stupid crap like this can help sway votes, but it does.

    But man, has she been putting her foot in her mouth since then or what? This whole “I bring a lifetime of experience, MCCAIN brings a lifetime of experience and Obama has a speech he made in 2002” shinola really makes me ill to experience. The fact that she’s said it at least 3 more times is just rancid icing on the moldy cake. We have one candidate trying to prove that we can get past traditional partisan hackery and make a race about the issues, and then there’s someone in the same political party who’s all about the INTRA-partisan hackery. Stop scorching the Earth, Clinton, you’re causing far more damage to the party than you’re willing to admit. And you know it.

  • Don’t get mad at SNL, they are not themselves to blame for the media bias (which still favors Obama), nor are they to blame for the shift in focus.

    The blame lies with the many questions being raised regarding Obama’s readiness to lead, and his credibility, which are the reason the press started actually scrutinizing him, something they had already been doing to Clinton for months.

    Quite frankly they should have been doing this from the beginning, he got a free ride for way too long, and without being scrutinized, he was effectively being endorsed by them.

    If he can’t answer those questions convincingly, he cannot be our nominee, period.

  • The blame lies with the many questions being raised regarding Obama’s readiness to lead, and his credibility

    If only there were some way to determine just who was raising these questions.

  • The media does have very self-indulgent fantasies of itself and the image it projects. They fell for the whole liberal media BS and are falling all over themselves to prove they are not liberal in any way.

    The SNL bit pointed out not that they were too hard on Hillary but too easy on Barack. “How dare reporters go easy on a liberal – have they no shame!” Now that Barack is back on the defensive with the media, all is right once again with Villagers covering the campaign.

  • Of course it’s silly. But then, Beltway pundits and journalists are rather silly creatures.

  • It took SNL to remind the media that a Democrat seemed to be on the way to both nomination and election, and that would never do. Democrats exist to be humiliated, not elected.

  • That the Clintons, who oversaw the conglomeration of the media that does us such a disservice, complain about the media would be funny if it wasn’t so tragically sad…in a Shakespearean way.

    Even my Republican leaning boss today pointed out that the media is driving this horse race for their own benefit, and he wasn’t gleeful about it.

    It would be one thing if they were actually investigating and reporting on either candidate, but it’s more like the Jerry Springer show where everyone has all their teeth and their wearing expensive suits.

  • Too bad Stephen Colbert’s skit at the correspondents’ dinner didn’t have the same effect.

  • “Did SNL really help produce media change?”

    No. The powers that be in the corporate media always meant Clinton to be the candidate. Any adverse coverage of her up until now was meant to weaken her before she ran against the GOP candidate. Now that Obama has exceeded anybody’s expectations for the delegate count, the press and punditry narrative will be highly skeptical and derisive of him right through the convention. Their pressure on the superdelegates to nominate Clinton will be immense. She is hated by both the left and the right, so it will be easy, once she’s nominated, for the media to turn on their guns on her while smoothly continuing the lovefest they already have going with McCain, completely overlooking all of his dishonesty, flaws and shortcomings.

    I can’t say that the prospect of the media savaging Madam Clinton once she’s nominated breaks my heart. Her ambition has turned her into an absolutly a vile, hateful person and she and her people have put on the shoddiest, nastiest, most mean-spirited intra-Democratic campaign I have ever witnessed in my entire life.

    I hope she gets what’s coming to her during the general election. I will never vote for her.

  • So, are you suggesting in the above article that Americans are poised to nominate a female presidential candidate out of PITY? It’s true that there’s no country like America for the herd mentality (witness the president who laughed all the way to the White House because middle America thought he’d be a fun guy to have a beer with), but that would take the cake.

  • But could one skit — which, if ratings are any indication, was watched live by a small percentage of the population — really have a significant impact?

    It’s not the small percentage of the population that initially watched something, but ‘who’ belonged to that small percentage that counts.

    Obviously, the right people were watching, and the ‘right’ marketing people saw an opening to be used to their advantage.

    You say something is awful, put it on Youtube and you created a firestorm…. Doesn’t matter how few people saw the original….

    How many people were present at the famous ‘macaca’ moment. less than a 100? It ended up costing him the senate seat he so much desired, once youtube distributed it.

  • Humor is a funny thing. SNL struck a nerve on a subject that has been floating around for a while – that the media were treating Obama and Clinton very differently.

    Yes, SNL lampooned it and made it ridiculous, but there was an underlying truth there or it never would have made an impact. I’m sure if the media watched the show they wouldn’t have thought it was funny and gone to bed.

    But the skit went viral (almost immediately) and by Monday the media realized they were being laughed at.

    It wasn’t the skit that got the media’s attention, it was the reaction of the public.

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