socialmedian: Take Cover!

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Take Cover! | New Yorker

Submitted by Netzoo

Jul 21, 2008

Summary

That cover of ours seems to have kicked off a bit of a fuss. I haven’t read all the comments. Life is short, and when I Google the blogs for “obama ‘new yorker’ cover” I get twenty thousand hits, on top of the 1.75 million I get from a regular search. But I’ve read a sampling.

Then there are my various e-mail and voice-mail inboxes, which overfloweth—and not, on the whole, in a good way. New Yorker readers (to say nothing of Hertzberg friends, acquaintances, and relatives) being who they are, all of these messages are from Obama supporters. Their complaints—some angry, some pained—are similar to those one encounters in the blogosphere. The complainants say: Regular readers of the magazine may “get” your joke (whether or not they like or think it’s funny), but what about nonreaders who just see it flashed on a TV screen? Even after they’re told it’s “satire,” aren’t a lot of “low-information voters” going to assume that the joke is aimed at Obama? Aren’t they going to assume that the cover simply exaggerates “the facts” for comic effect—i.e., that it’s not really saying that Barack Obama is an Al Qaeda-loving, flag-burning Islamist terrorist and Michelle Obama a gun-toting Black Panther, just that he’s an ordinary Muslim and she’s an ordinary black militant? That where there’s smoke there’s fire? Read the full article

Comments (1)

Netzoo,

Jul 21, 2008

forget about the cover... Ryan Lizza's extensive piece inside the magazine on Obama's early political career in Chicago is brilliantly reported and very informative.