Veteran SNL writer: We were 'an arm of the Hollywood Democratic establishment'
In an excerpt from the updated version of 2002's Live from New York, an oral history of Saturday Night Live, former SNL head writer and producer James Downey says that the show avoided attacking President Obama for multiple seasons:
While Downey's former SNL co-worker Horatio Sanz attributes this assessment to the conservative Downey being "the Karl Rove of SNL," Downey casts himself as a conservative Democrat who declared support for Obama in the 2008 election. In the same excerpt, Downey says that his own writing of Obama contributed to the friendly portrayal:
The new edition of Live from New York comes out Sept. 9.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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