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Norm Macdonald was never a news anchor—but he played one TV. Lauded as one of the most iconic “Weekend Update” hosts to grace our screens, much attention is paid to the late comedian’s time on “Saturday Night Live” in “Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald,” a documentary released Friday on Netflix.
With renewed attention on the comic because of the documentary, we looked back at Macdonald’s 1997 interview with Playboy, in which he talked about the show, his political leanings and more in the span of 20 questions. But it was one answer about so-called “fake news” that really jumped out. “SNL” fans know that “Weekend Update” is a satirical take on a news segment, not a source for reliable journalism, which is why Macdonald thought it would be funny to label the program “fake news” during his three-year run as host.
“When you do a parody, you’re supposed to pretend it’s real, so I thought it would be funny to say it’s not real,” Macdonald told Playboy. Nearly 20 years before President Donald Trump ever uttered the term, the comedian brushed off the idea that he’d ever need to seriously label satire as “fake news”—or that anyone would really misunderstand how to determine legitimate news. In doing so, he made a prescient observation about where the media landscape was heading.
“It would be bad if more Americans got their news from me than from any other source. It was my idea to say ‘fake news’—as if you need to say that,” Macdonald told Playboy when asked if he started calling the segment “fake news” because he doubted the audience’s ability to discern real news from satire. “Later, I found out that when I did some harder jokes, the censors would say, ‘Oh well, if he says it’s fake news….’ It turned out to be a disclaimer.”
It doesn’t seem like Macdonald, who died in 2021 from complications of acute leukemia at the age of 61, was making a joke when he answered Playboy‘s question about “fake news.” But boy, his answer is funny in today’s media landscape. Since Trump started using the term to dismiss the news media as unreliable, false and even malicious, there’s been a massive decline in trust in journalism. In 2016, when Trump brought “fake news” into the lexicon, Pew Research Center reported that 76 percent of Americans said they have a lot or some trust in national news organizations. Today, only 56 percent of Americans still agree. And while most people say they are confident in their own ability to determine the legitimacy of the news, they’re not sure that their peers will know the difference between the nightly news and Macdonald’s “Weekend Update.” Only 3 percent of adults told Pew that they’re “very confident” in other peoples ability to check the accuracy of the news. It’s not clear that Trump’s use of “fake news” led to that steep decline in trust—there are plenty of faults with how the media functions that could’ve eroded trust. But, it’s hard not to notice the correlation.
Now, if only Pew would poll Americans on how many of them now get their news from “Weekend Update.”
