Fact Checking Saturday Night Live, But Not Obama

Do you remember last year when the mainstream news media took Tina Fey to task for her unflattering and unfair portrayals of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live? If you do, then please get back to me, because I certainly don’t remember it. In fact, as I sift through the cobwebs and dust bunnies of my memory, I seem to recall that Tina Fey was awarded an Emmy Award for her lacerating, below the belt satires. And I recall that her skits were replayed on news programs at more convenient hours so that a broader audience could watch them.

Every time that I think that the mainstream news media have hit rock bottom, they unlimber their picks and shovels, spit on their hands, and start digging. Last weekend, the late night comedy show Saturday Night Live did a short skit poking fun at Barack Obama, something that they have done uncountable times to every other president since the show’s inception. But this time it was different. No, this skit wasn’t any funnier. The difference was the reaction. CNN actually devoted a portion of its evening news program to fact checking the SNL skit.

I am not making this up. CNN cited an organization called “PolitiFact,” which fancies itself as a non-partisan arbiter of political debate. During CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer’s “Situation Room,” PolitiFact’s Bill Adair picked apart the SNL skit piece by piece comparing it with his perception of reality.

Is it any wonder that Fox News attracts more viewers in the key 25-54 year old demographic at 3:00 AM than CNN does during its 8:00 PM primetime broadcast?

With a slightly better delivery, Wolf Blitzer could represent a threat to Comedy Central’s Daily Show and Colbert Report. I doubt that Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert ever imagined anything so laughable as CNN’s fact checking a comedy routine that dared to poke fun at the Chosen One.

Fox News’ Glenn Beck has become a favorite punching bag of the media lately, but measured by the standards that the mainstream media apply to themselves, Glenn Beck should be a multiple Pulitzer Prize winner. After all, it is Glenn Beck who has spearheaded investigations of the powerful whom CNN defends. Glenn Beck’s exposés of Obama’s “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones forced Jones’ resignation. The ACORN prostitution and underage sex slave scandal gained national exposure through Glenn Beck. And the attempt to politicize the National Endowment for the Arts as the propaganda organ for the Obama Administration was brought into national view by Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck may well be a buffoon, but he’s outperforming the people who ridicule him.

Perhaps CNN should follow the lead of the New York Times and hire someone to train an ear now and then outside its own echo chamber and learn what concerns normal people.

So out of touch had the New York Times become that it had to hire a double secret editor tasked with taking occasional peaks outside the Times’ cocoon. The Times Public editor, Clark Hoyt, described how the Gray Lady was caught flatfooted on numerous occasions by events that did not register as priorities within the Times regimented, lockstep monoculture. The first that Times readers learned of the fulminating controversy that eventually overtook top Van Jones was when the Times reported his resignation. The ACORN scandal finally made the Times when Congress voted to defund it.

Clark Hoyt reported in a follow up column the laments of loyal Times’ readers, such as the one who lamented that he could not discuss current events with friends, “I get all my news from The New York Times.”

Two weeks into the experiment, the Times’ double secret editor hasn’t managed to see much. So far, the Times is unaware that Obama’s “Safe Schools Czar,” Kevin Jennings, had confessed to facilitating a sexual relationship between an older man and an underage boy enrolled at the school where he was a teacher. And this is not an aberration. Jennings is on tape praising the founder of the North American Man Boy Love Association. CNN has similarly ignored the story except to defend Jennings by claiming that the boy was 16 years old, not 15 as Jennings believed.

CNN and the New York Times are losing viewers and readers. I’ve got an idea. Why not try reporting? It works for Glenn Beck.