When You've Lost Saturday Night Live, Have You Lost America?

It was at least a dozen years ago when I read that far more Americans relied upon late night talk show comedians for their news than the network news anchors. In fact a plurality of the poll’s respondents identified late night comedians as their primary news source. And today, Jon Stewart’s Daily Show stands as the most watched “news” program on cable television. The program boasts that more people depend upon the Daily Show as their news source than should. And, as Saturday Night Live showed recently, it seems that comedians still hold more sway over voters than real journalists.
That’s probably because the mainstream media’s Obama swoon was becoming indistinguishable from Comedy Central parody. After all, who would you watch if you were looking for a good laugh, Steven Colbert or Katy Couric? The Obama worship services were approaching 1960’s Beatlemania proportions until Saturday Night Live spoofed a Democratic presidential debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. In that skit, the journalists treated the Obama character with undisguised slavish adulation, then fell into rapturous heavy breathing when he emitted a clichéd and vacuous response. It was quite convincing.
The You Tube video of the skit went viral and Hillary Clinton even referred to it during the next debate and followed up by wondering why the moderators didn’t start the debate by asking, “Barack if he's comfortable and needs another pillow.” The quip dripped with Clintonian petulance, but nevertheless resonated, although not with everyone.
The usually tough on everybody Tim Russert apparently had not seen the video and held fast to the Obamamania embraced long ago. During a January interview with Hillary Clinton on “Meet The Press,” Russert repeated a paragraph from Obama’s frequently cited speech in which he declared that he was not against all wars, just “dumb wars” and argued that Obama was “right all along.”
Whether or not Obama’s good fortune in finding himself properly positioned for Code Pink’s subsumption of the Democratic Party qualifies him as being “right all along” is a matter for another debate. It was Russert’s unqualified assertion that Hillary Clinton had been wrong all along that exposed his bias.
When Russert tried to show his toughness during the debate, he just couldn’t quite bring himself to close the deal. He noted that Obama’s Afrocentric church pastor praised the antisemitic Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan as one who “epitomizes greatness” and once traveled with Farrakhan to meet Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. This should have been followed with a question about Obama’s judgment. After all, what Republican would be granted a pass for attending a Eurocentric church whose pastor travelled halfway around the world with a racist to genuflect before an egomaniacal totalitarian despot? Instead, the question he ultimately asked was nothing more than an escape hatch that provided Obama with an opportunity to reassure his “Jewish support.”
Good grief!
The days that followed were different. Suddenly Obama was being asked questions that he had previously been spared. What was his relationship with Tony Rezko? What other politician could possibly have gotten away with profiting from an indicted political fixer? Suddenly, the media were talking about Obama’s secret back channel conversations with the Canadian government where he reassured them that his threat to abrogate the North American Free Trade Agreement was only demagoguery meant to seduce the rubes in Ohio.
As the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank put it, Obama reacted as though he’d been “bitten by his own dog.”
The effect was dramatic. Exit polls in Texas showed that Clinton won 61%-38% among voters who had made up their minds in the final three days before the election. In 2004 Newsweek’s Evan Thomas claimed that the media bias in John Kerry’s favor would be worth 15% in the general election. In last Tuesday’s primary, a few days of honest scrutiny showed that Obama’s media support had been worth even more than that.
People who take themselves seriously and who wish to be taken seriously by others cannot bear getting laughed at. The Saturday Night Live skit worked as humor because it contained so much truth. In the end, journalists found that their own credibility was more valuable to them than an Obama presidency. And now, even the Daily Show is laughing at Obama. How far we’ve come. Now, politicians have to worry if they’ve lost Jon Stewart.