SNL Explains How Wikileaks Is Like TMZ

Saturday Night Live's spoof of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, the group's founder, is funny. But it's also got some ideas of which Assange may want to take note. The SNL skit portrays WikiLeaks as abandoning its media strategy, which the fake Assange says failed "to inspire revolution, as I had hoped," and adopting an approach better designed to capture peoples' attention.

Specifically, SNL has WikiLeaks mimmick the muckraking celebrity gossip website TMZ. After all, lengthy State Department cables explaining geopolitical complexities are not very engaging for most people. But everyone loves celebrity gossip. So why not use the TMZ approach to expose diplomatic misdeeds? Here's the skit, which features a surprisingly compelling Robert De Niro as Afghan President Hamid Karzai: