We witnessed another mediocre edition of Saturday Night Live on NBC, but one snippet of the “Weekend Update” fake-news caught my attention. It came from fake anchor Michael Che, blink and you’ll miss it. He joked Biden supporters are “more likely to get their news from newspapers and mainstream media, while Trump supporters get their news from T-SHIRTS!”
The T-shirt on screen said “Joe Biden sucks.” Translation: Democrats read The New York Times for hours, then probably master the crossword puzzle in a half-hour. Republicans read T-shirts and maybe a bumper sticker or two. Yes the right-wingers are too stupid for news reports in complete sentences. SNL’s analysis of media consumption among conservatives are pretty much like the scribbles on the front of a T-shirt.
SNL could be speaking for our media elites. If you fail to read them and trust them implicitly and follow all of their political marching orders, they assume you hate a free press and wish desperately for the End of Democracy.
Also: A new poll from AP and the American Press Institute found only 14 percent of expressed a great deal of confidence in election-related information they receive from national media. By contrast, 52 percent have little or no confidence at all in the information they receive from national news organizations. 53 percent, say they are extremely or very concerned that news organizations will report inaccuracies or misinformation during the election. Imagine that!
AP media reporter David Bauder turned to American Press Institute chief Michael Bolden, who said “Years of suspicion about journalists, much of it sown by politicians, is partly responsible, he said. People are also less familiar with how journalism works.”
Reporters have sown “years of suspicion about politicians.” That’s how investigating politician performance could be described. So why would investigating journalist performance draw complaints of “sowing years of suspicion”? Why can they never be evaluated for how they serve the public? They want to run the country, and they don’t want you complaining about it, okay?
Bolden is implying that politicians have swindled the public with this liberal-bias thing, because they’re not very bright. Then he lobbed another insult, that people aren’t familiar with “how journalism works.” Oh no, we know exactly how it works, and we know it’s not working for us.
Enjoy the podcast below, or whenever you listen to podcasts.