campaign, one of the most watched sources for this kind of parody was
NBC’s Saturday Night Live (SNL), a television sketch comedy show which
has provided parody and satire of presidential candidates since the 1970s.
In the 2008 election, SNL’s Tina Fey (a former cast member who
returned in order to take on this role) performed several parodies of Sarah
Palin to great acclaim. Critics and commentators drew attention,
repeatedly, to the facility with which Fey recreated Palin’s dialect or
accent.
In “The Linguistic Mocking of Sarah Palin,” Davies (2009) compares
the SNL parodies of all four candidates (McCain, Palin, Obama, Biden)
and finds that in three cases, idiosyncratic traits were amplified for the
sake of humor, but in Palin’s case the underlying message was distinctly
different. Davies proposes that those who wrote the skits about Palin
meant to expose the candidate’s faults and make them available for
ridicule, in order to demonstrate her unsuitability for office.
In fact, there was nothing unusual or inappropriate in this; parody and
satire are protected rights, and SNL has a proud history of taking a
political stand. But with every new parody of Palin, the tone intensified.
Finally, the information industry got involved. Rather than simply
observing and reporting news from the campaign, news media began to
fold information and reports about Fey’s parody of Palin into their
coverage, obscuring the line between satire and news. Clips of the skits
began to show up on major news broadcasts, sometimes paired with clips
of Palin herself. On a CNN news broadcast, Wolf Blitzer took pains to
point out how Fey’s parody had further solidified the general impression
that Palin had performed very badly in a televised interview (CNN’s Late
Edition, September 28, 2008).
This phenomenon did not elude the Republican campaign organizers or
Palin’s supporters. Writing for The Rocky Mountain News after Fey’s
parody of Palin’s interview with Katie Couric had aired, Littwin noted that
“Palin needed to be perceived as semi-credible again, meaning that when
people looked at her, they didn’t see Tina Fey. In other words, she needed
a debate that didn’t provide a late-night TV punch line” (2008).
Darling posits that when mocking has reached this stage, the object has
lost all credibility and cannot be taken seriously, something borne out by
the commentary of the time in news reports of all kinds:
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