GREAT MOMENTS IN SELECTIVE AMNESIA, PART DEUX:

Shot: Trump accuses SNL of being part of media conspiracy to ‘rig’ the election: The Donald hits out at Alec Baldwin’s ‘hit job’, says his portrayal ‘stinks’ and calls for the ‘unfunny’ show to be cancelled.

—Headline, the London Daily Mail, yesterday.

Chaser:

But many of the show’s writers say..without equivocation, that Saturday Night was out to get [Gerald Ford’s Press Secretary, Ron Nessen when Nessen stupidly agreed to host a show in April of 1976]. The attitude, [writer] Rosie Shuster said, was: “The President’s watching. Let’s make him cringe and squirm”…[Producer Lorne Michaels] is proudest of the time Saturday Night replayed, three days before the 1976 election between Ford and Jimmy Carter, the speech in which Ford announced his pardon of Richard Nixon. The feeling on the 17th floor was that the pardon had been conveniently forgotten by the press and that a reminder was in order.

—Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, 1986.

As Jazz Shaw writes at Hot Air, “Stop complaining about Trump’s ‘war on the media’ because he’s right.”