Don't Laugh, CNN Report

[Arthur Kade]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...mEditorialPage

If you don't think "Saturday Night Live" is funny anymore, try watching CNN. Those guys are hilarious. Yesterday on Wolf Blitzer's "Situation Room," the network "fact checked" an SNL skit. No joke! The transcript is here, video is here. "How much truth is behind all the laughs?" Blitzer intoned as he teased the upcoming segment. "Stand by for our reality check."

The skit, which you can view here, features one of the "SNL" guys imitating President Obama. "When you look at my record, it's very clear what I have done so far. And that is nothing," he says. "Almost one year and nothing to show for it. You don't believe me? You think I'm making it up? Take a look at this checklist." He then rehearses a series of campaign promises--closing Guantanamo, improving Afghanistan, taking over the health-care system and so on--and declares all of them undone.

CNN interviews Bill Adair of the St. Petersburg Times's PolitiFact, one of those supposedly nonpartisan fact-checking outfits, which actually published a "study" of the "SNL" skit earlier yesterday. Adair says:

I think "SNL" tended to kind of gloss over what is a--a fair amount of progress by this administration, about sending two additional brigades to Afghanistan. We rated that [as] a promise kept. On Iraq, "Saturday Night Live" said not done and, of course, that's true, they're not done. But they hadn't promised to be done by now.

Reporter Kareen Wynter adds: "As for health care, Adair says 'SNL' also got it wrong, since that legislation is still stalled in Congress." Which means it has been done? Well, whatever. "But Adair says the sketch did get some things right, like Guantanamo Bay. PolitiFact says the president has fallen short on that promise."

"Fact checking" a comedy sketch is a bizarre exercise in itself. PolitiFact does not appear to have done the same for past "SNL" sketches spoofing Republican politicians like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin. (In fact, CNN reports that Adair, in the network's words, "says the sketch won't resonate with the audience as much as" Tina Fey's Palin send-up.)

It's as if CNN and the St. Petersburg Times are trying to reinforce the impression that they are in the tank for Obama. Even Democratic operative Paul Begala, who appears on a panel after the "fact check," seems embarrassed by the exercise: "Come on. It's comedy. . . . I thought it was amusing that we actually went to people to fact-check a comedy sketch. It's comedy. It's supposed to be silly and funny."

There's another way to look at it, though: If only we'd had CNN and PolitiFact back in the 1970s, we would have known that Gerald Ford wasn't really as clumsy as Chevy Chase's portrayal of him, that Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin weren't really two wild and crazy guys from Czechoslovakia, and that Jane Curtin is not an ignorant slut.