Saturday Night Live

Chevy Chase: (on phone) Hello, Angola? Very hard to hear you... (pause) Angelo?! During the segment in this edition of "Weekend Update" where Chevy is attempting to reach a correspondent in Angola to describe the brutal conflict there, he ends up on the phone with Angelo's Pizzeria (with stock footage of a pizza parlor shown on the big screen at frame right) instead. Like with Chevy's fake "file reports," this was probably also a dig at some of the shoddy news reporting practices alleged to have been engaged in the late 1960's by New York television station WPIX (Channel 11) and the resulting reputation that haunted the station for many years afterward, as described elsewhere in the Episode Allusions section.

This edition of "Weekend Update" also marked the beginning of a frequent running gag which will be used for much of the rest of Chevy Chase's run as an "SNL" regular, in which he would introduce a file report, whereby an offscreen voice is heard describing the story in detail to different "artist's renditions" which largely looked like child's drawings, and in the last second of the report the "reporter" was revealed to be Chevy himself, using an assumed name and holding his nose to get the effect of reports transmitted through phone lines. Later editions would show clips of old black-and-white cartoons, stop-motion puppet animation or one-reelers, that would all be passed off at different times as file footage. This is likely a parody of the reputation accrued by the news division of New York television station WPIX (Channel 11) in the late 1960's in the wake of accusations that the station had falsified its news reports, the specifics of which included old stock footage being shown with the words "Via Satellite" emblazoned on the screen, or a "live report" by phone supposedly from a foreign location such as Prague when, in fact, the report was actually filed from a pay-telephone booth in Manhattan. Such slipshod practices actually led to a decade-long challenge to the license of the station's owner/operator, WPIX Inc. (a division of the New York Daily News), beginning in 1969, that was filed with the FCC by a group called Forum Communications, Inc., which was led by future NBC News president Lawrence Grossman. It took many years - and changes in news director and news staff - for Channel 11 to turn its news reputation around, and by the time WPIX Inc. and the Daily News finally won their license fight in 1979, the station became the first independent New York television station to win an Emmy Award for outstanding news coverage.