The sinking ore barge of ratings and Saturday Night Live reached a lull somewhere in the depths of the Mariana Trench and outside of the scope and capabilities of modern robotic diving equipment a day before the weekly broadcast. (Oh the dizzying and wacky wonders of social media.)
In an attempt to salvage the caustic wreck created by the audacity of an SNL writer to author a disparaging tweet about President Trump’s 10-year-old son Barron, NBC officials apparently acted swiftly and suspended the perpetrator indefinitely. Fox News reports that while NBC has not given official word as to the fate of the offensive Katie Rich and her Twitter post launched on Friday which reached the threshold of viral due to the sickening and disgusting lexicon of the content, there will be sanctions enacted by the media giant in direct response to the epic failure in attempting humor.
In a lame effort to assuage the backlash and vitriol in direct response to her embarrassing wildfire of contempt, Rich pulled the old delete the Twitter account and then reactivate and post multiple “heartfelt” apologies laden with phony sentiment. The question remains, will the network do the right thing and ultimately terminate the maligned writer and maintain a precedent of intolerance for ideas and language that do not pass community standards.
Trump’s relationship with SNL has recently undergone a mini-ice age, due to differences in opinion on evaluating Alec Baldwin’s attempts to impersonate the former entrepreneur. This is not the first time that first time that writers have endured a prompt public counter-attack for stepping over the line in grilling members of the presidential family. Jimmy Carter’s son and Chelsea Clinton were two of the notable cases where the network received a wealth of egg on the face in displaying poor taste for allowing certain sketches to air.
As a long-standing destination for political and societal satire, the show has lost a fair percentage of viewership over the last year due to negative reaction over selected content and fierce competition from internet-based streaming viewing options.
Read the Fox News article here.