The Saturday Night Live agenda: Gender, representation and framing in political comedy coverage of elections

Abstract

Reporting on women politicians has often employed stereotypically gendered framing which, beyond normative concerns about bias, has possible consequences for democratic processes such as negative effects on political ambition for women (e.g., Haraldsson and Wängnerud, 2019) and cultivation of gendered biases among audiences (e.g., Aley and Hahn, 2020; Gerbner et al. 2002; Scharrer and Blackburn, 2018). While declines in gendered stereotypes have been observed in traditional news media coverage, this has not been tested in the context of non-traditional media such as political comedy, despite voters being more likely to regularly watch this type of media than many traditional news programs (ANES, 2021).

This thesis substantially advances understandings of gender and representation in non-traditional media by offering the first comprehensive empirical analysis of gendered representations of presidential candidates in political comedy and related audience cultivation effects. The research agenda on political comedy has thus far been primarily focused on news parody programs (Leicht, 2023) with little attention given to other forms of political comedy, such as impressionist sketch comedy. Using Saturday Night Live coverage from the 2016 and 2020 US Democratic Primaries as cases, this thesis offers the first systematic examination of impressionist sketch comedy as a news source.

Results of this thesis provide support for findings from recent scholarship, suggesting a decline in gendered stereotypes in media coverage. They further reveal the agenda setting power of impressionist sketch comedy and its ability to prompt wider discourse about democratic representation of minoritized groups, underlining this media format’s authority in the political media landscape of the United States and suggesting a great potential and responsibility of non-traditional media as disseminators of political news. This work offers fundamental contributions to political communication studies and builds the foundation for future research in this area that is growing in importance.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Caroline Victoria Leicht: orcid.org/0000-0001-9822-857X

ORCID for Will Jennings: orcid.org/0000-0001-9007-8896

ORCID for Jessica Smith: orcid.org/0000-0002-4909-8884

ORCID for Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte: orcid.org/0000-0002-9330-3945

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