Saturday Night Live’s producer and writers are denying that the show has taken on a pro-Clinton bias since it’s return from the writer’s strike:
Lorne Michaels has an answer to the political columns, cartoons and comments that have accused his show, “Saturday Night Live,” of favoring Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton during her primary showdown with Senator Barack Obama: Nope.
“I’m in show business and I never, ever forget that,” Mr. Michaels said in a telephone interview on Tuesday night. “We put on a comedy show.”
Or as Jim Downey, the “SNL” writer who has created all of the recent political sketches on the show — and most of its famous ones going back two decades — put it on Wednesday, “I’m just trying to make the sketches funny.”
Over the past three weeks “SNL” has put itself back into the national discussion — not a bad place for any television show to be, as Mr. Michaels acknowledged — first with a series of sketches that have centered on the premise that Mrs. Clinton has been the target of a vengeful press that sees Mr. Obama with stars in its eyes and also with the overt (albeit comic) endorsement of Mrs. Clinton by Tina Fey, the former “SNL” star who returned on Feb. 23 to be the host of the first show after the recent writers’ strike. “Bitches get stuff done,” Ms. Fey said, using herself as an example.
In the weeks that followed, some commentators have cited the comedy bits as aids that have helped revive Mrs. Clinton’s campaign with primary victories in Ohio and Texas. A study by the Pew research organization found that critical coverage of Mr. Obama had increased in the news media after the sketches.
Even Mr. Downey, who said he had never intended to boost Mrs. Clinton, picked up the message. “Hillary supporters started coming up to me and thanking me,” he said.
Mr. Michaels, who has been the executive producer of “SNL” off and on (mostly on) since its inception in 1975, said that he was happy the show had benefited from the attention — the Feb. 23 show attracted 7.5 million viewers, the biggest audience for the show in a year — but that he still worried about the perception.
“I’m sensitive to the suggestion that we’re in the service of Hillary Clinton this year,” he said. “That obviously is not the case.” He added, “We don’t lay down for anybody.”
In some sense, I think that the perception that the SNL sketches that have made the news are “pro-Clinton” and
“anti-Obama” is mis-placed. It seems clear that what the writers were really going after was the media fawning over Obama that had been going on since mid-January, examples of which include Chris Matthews admitting to getting a “chill run up his leg” when he heard Obama speak. It came off as pro-Clinton only because the media wasn’t giving Obama the scrutiny that needs to be given.
