Last night, Saturday
Night Live aired a skit which imitated HBO’s
“Westworld” in order to parody Anderson Cooper and CNN’s way of delivering news. In the skit, there are five
participants led in conversation by Anderson Cooper (played by Alex Moffat). In
the skit, the writers used parody, repetition, and symbolism to demonstrate CNN’s
flawed news coverage. Anderson Cooper starts out by telling the group that
Donald Trump had recently called for top secret security of his kids. Each
respondent shared their opinion (all were against it) claiming that this was as
of yet the worst thing that Trump had done. Anderson Cooper brings up another
point about the KKK, to which the respondents repeat their exact same lines,
just at a faster pace, claiming that now this
was the worst thing Trump had done so far (including the incident from seconds
earlier). This happens a few more times until Anderson Cooper begins to realize
that everyone was just repeating themselves. All of a sudden, everyone freezes
and two mechanics come out and replace the conscious Anderson Cooper with a new,
lifeless Anderson Cooper (this one played by Beck Bennett) and the skit
continues as before.
The skit was created as a parody to first off remake “Westworld,”
but more so to mock news sources like CNN.
Saturday Night Live is obviously a
satirical program, and this would not be one of their skits without some
satirical strategies like parody. Within this parody, the writers of the skit
used repetition to show that the news providers don’t come up with much new
content. It is all repeated, over and over. In the skit, the participants all
responded negatively to Donald Trump’s actions, but then moved on and accepted
them. Some of the things Trump had been said to have done were horrible, yet
they were forgotten by the anchors. It goes to show that news anchors almost
blindly read their lines. In the end, it turns out that all of the characters
are robots, and this symbolism further depicts the news anchors as mechanical. If
they were just plain news anchors (if we never saw the robotic side to them),
there would not be such a great emphasis on their (lack of) qualities. It
really highlights the lack of creativity in the news anchors and programs. Through
the pure repetition of similar events and the symbolism of news anchors as
robots, ultimately, I think that SNL
was successful in bringing light to the faults of news programs like CNN.
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