My lovely and extremely talented significant other missed the Tina Fey as Sarah Palin tour de force this past weekend on Saturday Night Live. So she did what millions of other young Americans have done: she went to You Tube to check it out. But there was a problem, which she shared with me this morning. The first half dozen, maybe more clips on the ubiquitous video upload site are not full-length excerpts from Saturday Night Live. They are, instead , outtakes from a Fox News broadcast covering the story.
A good portion of these clips are taken up by Fox News commentators yacking about the show. (AKA: shoot me now, please.) They then switch to an extremely abridged version of the SNLsketch, about half a minute or so out of what I believe was a five minute bit. And as more cynical (or seasoned) observers might have already guessed, the part of the sketch Fox chose to feature makes our potential “Pitbull with Lipstick” Veep look downright reasonable. Meanwhile, Amy Poehler’s Hillary Clinton gets all the laughs as she practically demolishes the podium out of pent-up jealousy.
In other words: if, like untold millions of people, you only saw the sketch via the Fox News upload on Youtube there’s a damn good chance you came away thinking SNL was bashing Hillary instead of poking fun at Palin. Never mind that the other four a half, five minutes of the sketch savagely lampooned the Alaska Gov.
I know NBC won’t let Youtube post any of its content. But still, how did Fox News’ coverage come to dominate the search results like this? Anyone else detect the distinct odor of the McCain campaign here?
Here is one of the offending Fox uploads: