Live From New York -- It's Liberal Media

Debra Saunders on Feb 17, 2025

WASHINGTON -- Sunday night's "SNL50: The Anniversary Special" celebrated the long-running NBC show as you knew it would -- with the soothing reassurance to its ostensibly liberal viewers that they own comedy and that, in their world, the right's only place in their orbit is as the butt of their self-satisfied jokes.

Even though President Donald Trump hosted the show in 2004 and 2015, he was conspicuously absent from the Rockefeller Plaza stage. Because everyone knows that an essential ingredient of any "SNL" episode is to reassure young voters that their politics have a monopoly on virtue and fun.

Days before the November election, during the show's famed cold open, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris got an assist from cast member Maya Rudolph, who played the vice president talking to herself (Harris) in the looking glass. It was a love fest. I remember watching that skit and thinking it exhibited yet another reason Trump was likely to win the election.

It's the smugness, stupid.

NBC has absolutely no problem signaling to the majority of voters who supported Trump that they have no place in the spotlight.

There was one pro-Trump character during the three-hour-plus TV special. MAGA-hat wearing contestant Tom Hanks at first recoils when "Black Jeopardy" host Kenan Thompson tries to shake his hand. Because, don't you know, Trump World is racist?

That's one reason I rarely watch the show. I am happy to laugh at my politics. I just wish "SNL" comedians could do likewise. The show's ratings might perk up, too.

Because, right now, watching "SNL" is sort of like watching a White House Correspondents' Association dinner. It's occasionally funny, but you know the comedian's political leanings will be further left than most voters.

Ditto Sunday morning fare on NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN.

On "Face the Nation" Sunday morning, host Margaret Brennan stepped in it again. As she interviewed Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Brennan engaged in the stalest of Sunday talk show habits: asking a Republican to comment on another Republican's ill-conceived rhetoric.

Except this time, the Republican quote-maker in question was highly articulate Vice President JD Vance, who on Friday very deliberately had told the Munich Security Conference that he fears the biggest security threat to Europe is not Russia or China or any external actor. "What I worry about is the threat from within," Vance told the gathering, "the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America." Values like free speech.

You might expect Brennan to appreciate Vance's remarks because, well, free speech is sort of important to the news business.

Instead, Brennan went after the "Hillbilly Elegy" author's remarks, when she argued, "Well, he was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide, and he met with the head of a political party that has far-right views and some historic ties to extreme groups."

So the cause of genocide in Nazi Germany wasn't antisemitism or Hitler, it was free speech.

I have one question: How is someone as completely out of touch as Brennan still working?

Conservative social media had a field day. Once again, the right is shown as the champion of the First Amendment while Big Media are asking what free speech accomplishes. And they have no idea how they look to the audience they are losing.

Who's going to tell them? It doesn't matter. They can't hear it.

That "Face the Nation" segment is the stuff of a "Saturday Night Live" skit. But do the "SNL" writers see that?

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.

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