Harvey Weinstein is a pig and it's all good that he's being skewered and investigated and fired.
But Lorne Michael's comment that "It's a New York thing" is being used out of context. This paragraph from the linked article explains:
The NYT story, however, puts Michaels’ comments in a different light. Apparently we’re all interpreting the word “it” wrong. “It’s a New York thing” doesn’t mean that SNL is respecting Weinstein because he’s from New York, it means that the whole story is too insular and coastal and wouldn’t play in the rest of the country with people who have never heard of Harvey Weinstein.
Weinstein is not particularly well-known outside of the entertainment business. The average person doesn't know who he is. Here's an example: Do you know who Scott Rudin is? (He's an incredibly successful movie and theater producer.) If I made a joke about Mr. Rudin, it would likely not make sense if you don't know who he is.
The SNL jokes fell flat during the rehearsal probably because of two reasons. One, the story had only just broken and hadn't built up enough public knowledge to be understandable. Two, after all of the sexual predation stories in the past several years, what new jokes could there be? After Cosby, O'Reilly, Weiner, Trump and all the others, that particular well of humor must be pretty dry.
A third reason SNL cut the jokes could be simply that they weren't funny. After all, much of SNL isn't that clever or funny.
There are serious issues in this story and Weinstein is going to be under a legal microscope for years to come. He's probably finished in the film business. Saturday Night Live's choice of targets for its humor seems relatively unimportant when compared to the larger issues facing our society.
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