SNL and the Mainstream Media

A lot has gone on since Barack Obama was sworn into office back in January. America has stared down the barrel of economic disaster, watched the situation in Afghanistan rapidly deteriorate, and seen one of the most polarizing healthcare debates in recent history take place. There's been laughter and there have been tears in the midst of a tumultuous nine months. Naturally, it's all Barack Obama's fault. Or so some people would like to believe.

The popular late night sketch show Saturday Night Live recently ran a sketch issuing a fairly harsh criticism of our president Barack Obama. In the skit, Fred Armisen as Obama was depicted as sitting in the oval office, going over how so far in his presidency, he’s done “nothing, nada.” Going over a checklist of his campaign promises Armisen-Obama went on to claim that he’s done nothing about everything from healthcare to Afghanistan.

This has of course raised a media flurry, and even prompted CNN to fact check a comedy sketch show. Because we live in the viral video generation, this sketch has been circulated pretty much everywhere imaginable. A quick Google search of “Obama SNL” will yield you a shade over 9 million hits. Such a controversial stance on a the president has given the mainstream media the cue to end their honeymoon period with Obama and has caused somewhat of a mini-panic.

Most syndicates are running pieces trying to determine how right SNL was, some of which are proclaiming that the sky is indeed falling and that we’ve been cursed with a “do-nothing” president. Others have gone about it with calmer minds once they realized that Obama’s been in office for less than 10 months. Expecting him to solve all of the nations problems in that amount of time isn’t fair to someone who’s receiving enough heat as it is trying to deliver on his healthcare promise, not to mention the allegations from fringe conservatives that he’s turning America into Nazi Germany.

That said, the most disappointing realization of this whole debacle has been that the only scenario in which the mainstream media will think to audit our president’s accomplishments is when prompted by a comedy sketch show. Sure, SNL’s so-called “allegations” are completely unfair given the sample size of time Obama’s spent in office. But this kind of behavior from the media is what got this country involved in an expensive Middle-East war that has cost thousands of American lives as well as billions of taxpayer dollars. Journalists have wasted enough ink on Saturday Night Live in the last week and not nearly enough on real issues (Afghanistan, military policy on gay soldiers, immigration, etc), which have only come up again since the sketch aired.

The mainstream media was off the mark in terms of what should have been reported during the run-up to the Iraq War and to this day it’s cost this country dearly. Nowadays it’s as though those very same people are asleep at the wheel, only waking up when a show like Saturday Night Live runs a politically themed sketch with a quasi-controversial issue that can be disproved in a two to three sentences.

The jury’s still out on Obama right now, namely because he hasn’t had time to get much done while meeting stubborn resistance at every stop. But it’d be nice to know that if and when something worth reporting comes up, America will see it’s press corps report responsibly and thoroughly. Right now, it doesn’t feel like that in the slightest.