The New Yorker Cover: What Exactly Is The Problem?

What the New Yorker Magazine did with their over the top Obama magazine cover (July 2008) was outrageous, but it achieved exactly what it was meant to do. A picture is worth a thousand words, or in this case millions of words (not to mention dollars), and man did this picture hit a hornets nest.

The Obama cartoon cover stirred up controversy, there-by providing oodles of free press, which in turn attracted readers (customers). Money is why the New Yorker exist, and with this issue they made a lot of it. But what about the content and message of the Obama article?

The New Yorker was trying to illustrate the “myths and rumors” that some on the Left feel “many Americans” have surrounding the Obama’s. Yet isn’t ironic that any expressed belief that these myths and rumors regarding Obama are held by a majority of non-Obama supporters (in particular Conservatives) are not only false, but really only reside in the imagination of liberals, as the New Yorker cover demonstrate so elegantly.

Now I am not saying that there aren’t people out there that don’t believe these rumors about Obama, but their numbers are so insignificant their not worth our attention. The New Yorker was trying to exaggerate a fallacy that perpetuates a real myth, that white America is really racist if you dig hard enough. But the controversies surrounding the New Yorker Magazine rest solely with Liberals.

Even funnier are the follow-up editorials and news reports (as collected by the LA Times…..consider the source):

Over at Top of the Ticket, Andrew Malcolm explains why the cover could be dangerous:

A lot of people won't get the joke. Or won't want to. And will use it for non-humorous purposes, which isn't the New Yorker's fault.

A problem is there's no caption on the cover to ensure that everyone gets the ha-ha-we've-collected-almost-every-cliched-rumor-about-Obama-in-one-place-in-order-to-make-fun-of-them punchline.

At Pandagon, Jesse Taylor agrees that the cover doesn't work as satire, particularly because it has to be explained:

It’s not actually satirizing the phenomenon of right-wing e-mail forwards, it’s just creating the ultimate version thereof. To put it in a different context, it’s like holding a satirized Klan rally by holding a Klan rally...with a laser show that makes a three-story image of a burning cross. A bigger, badder, better version of the thing you’re attempting to mock doesn’t constitute mockery, it just constitutes a gaudier version of the thing you’re addressing.

The Plank also thinks it doesn't work, because of the magazine's elitist posture:

And that, of course, is precisely what's wrong with the cover: the image is satirical only because it appears on the cover of the New Yorker, which, we all know, is a right-thinking magazine read by right-thinking people who couldn't possibly be among the 10 percent of Americans who believe Obama's a Muslim. The New Yorker"Stop Snitching"National Review, or that t-shirt on a black person in a crime-infested neighborhood, and the message takes on a very different meaning. assumes everyone knows it's being ironic with its cover, sort of the way the white hipster in a gentrifying neighborhood assumes everyone knows he's being ironic when he wears a t-shirt. But put that image on the cover of

Times columnist Jonah Goldberg chimes in at The Corner:

What I find interesting about the New Yorker cover is that it's almost exactly the sort of cover you could expect to find on the front of National Review. Roman Genn could do wonders with that concept. Of course, if we ran the exact same art, the consensus from the liberal establishment could be summarized in words like "Swiftboating!" and, duh, "racist."

Michelle Obama Watch too wonders about liberal racism:

Does anybody remember that loon from Daily Kos that thought it was a good idea to show Michelle Obama being lynched and tortured because he had a really good point to make?

Michelle Malkin is most concise in her take, and tells Obama to "grow a pair." Althouse, on that note, wonders why everyone is talking about nuts.

Salon's War Room blog, like Althouse, makes it past the cover:

In this case, though, there's a tangential relationship, as the magazine's Ryan Lizza has a really interesting profile of Obama, done by looking through the lens of his rise in Chicago. In fact, if I were Lizza, I'd be pretty upset at my editors today, as this controversy has ensured that his article is going ignored. Like so many articles in the magazine, it's long, complicated and detailed, and reporters and commentators who are discussing the cover are skipping over the article, presumably for reasons of time.... Lizza's article isn't a hit piece, but it paints a complicated and at times unflattering portrait of Obama, one that would have had some potential to be politically damaging to the presumptive Democratic nominee were it not for the attention the cover's getting instead.

See New Yorker editor David Remnick's defense here, the cartoonist's response here, and the article here.

The satire feel flat on its face (as an attempted “case in point” to a false problem), and only helped to create more insignificant banter amongst an already non-responsive media. The New Yorker article was not flattering of Obama, but the cover allows for the media to walk pass that little ditty, and create a dust storm about nothing. But I love how some Progressives have tried to lay the blame for this mess with non-Obama supporters. Hate to burst your bubble, but this one rest squarely with the New Yorker, the ADD media, and Progressive trying to divert attention away from the candidate.