Funny Business

Cesca makes a really good point over at his blog right now that I want to expand on a little.

Over the weekend, Saturday Night Live ran a sketch that took aim at Barack Obama and basically sent him up for supposedly not getting anything done since taking office. It wasn't especially funny -- which should come as no surprise -- but it's obviously SNL's prerogative to lampoon whomever they want politically and there's no crime in being even-handed.

The problem is the way MSNBC is now playing the sketch -- and when I say "playing," I don't just mean playing the actual clip over and over (which they are); I mean the way they're playing it as some sort of controversy for the Obama administration to now have to overcome. It's a ridiculous conceit -- albeit one that says plenty about the media's addiction to contrived conflict -- to say that because a sketch comedy show rips on a political figure that the figure in question has to answer for it. I laughed when Tina Fey mercilessly ripped Sarah Palin, but I certainly didn't think that Palin needed to respond to it. The Fey impression, regardless, had the benefit of novelty. The media took to it because it represented a kind of planetary alignment of political-comedic destiny. Everyone's already seen Armisen's Obama impression; this time around it was the material he was doing that acted as a dog whistle for the frothy-mouthed press.

But not the whole press, mind you. On cable, it's mostly MSNBC that's beating this "story" to death. And that's where the real issue becomes obvious -- and things get dicey.

I've written so many times in the past about NBC Universal's obnoxious, non-stop barrage of cross-promotion between its various entities that by now these words can practically type themselves. Turn on any NBC outlet and it'll almost surely be pimping for another NBC outlet in some fashion. The Today Show welcomes the cast of Top Chef, who cook on GE appliances for the crew from Telemundo who are interviewing the star of that new Stargate Universe show on SyFy, who'll be guest hosting the Today Show next week along with one of the Real Housewives of Wherever-the-Hell. Long ago NBC decided that what it didn't have in quality it was going to make up for in seamless corporate synergy across all platforms. (Constantly pointing this out, incidentally, even through outright mockery, is part of the meta-genius that's made 30 Rock not only funny but useful to NBC.) The problem is that in an effort to promote Saturday Night Live -- which MSNBC does regularly every chance it gets like a good little corporate team player -- it behooves MSNBC to make it seem as if SNL is the kind of cultural juggernaut that has the power to spark controversy and make news. That when the show does something like, say, slam Barack Obama -- the shockwaves are felt in the highest corridors of power.

This is the definition of a conflict of interest. By MSNBC deeming that an SNL sketch has the power to make trouble for the President of the United States, and actually debating it as such -- ad nauseam -- MS is doing the NBC mothership a very big favor. NBC's news department is acting as a promotional tool for NBC programming.

There aren't strong enough words to describe how ethically questionable this is.

Although, we're talking about the same network that devoted an entire episode of Dateline, ostensibly a news magazine program, to pimping Donald Trump and The Apprentice.

At this point, I'm not sure anything NBC did would surprise me.