Veteran SNL writer: We were 'an arm of the Hollywood Democratic establishment'

Veteran SNL writer: We were 'an arm of the Hollywood Democratic establishment'
(Image credit: Facebook.com/snl)

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:

But I have to say, and even [Al] Franken agrees with me — I've talked to him about this — that the last couple seasons of the show were the only two in the show's history where we were totally like every other comedy show: basically, an arm of the Hollywood Democratic establishment. [Jon] Stewart was more nuanced. We just stopped doing anything which could even be misinterpreted as a criticism of Obama. [Live from New York, via Hollywood Reporter]

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Bonnie Kristian

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.