New Yorker editor defends Obama cover

By Joe Garofoli - San Francisco Chronicle
Tuesday, July 15, 2008 - Web Link
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July 15, 2008

Satire is the thinnest of tightropes, especially in a 24-hour news cycle where every political utterance or image is parsed, gnawed and spit out. That explains why New Yorker editor David Remnick has spent the past day trying to explain that the latest cover of his magazine - depicting Sen. Barack Obama in Muslim garb and his wife, Michelle, as an Afro-sporting gun packer - is intended as a satire.

"The fact is, it's not a satire about Obama - it's a satire about the distortions and misconceptions and prejudices about Obama," Remnick said in an interview with the Huffington Post on Monday.

Remnick's problem is that a lot of people aren't laughing, especially when a significant portion of the country still believes falsehoods about the Obamas' backgrounds. Critics say that a satire about misconceptions is a bit hard to grasp without much context in an image full of racially and culturally loaded images. The magazine is not even getting slack from those who respect the liberal weekly, an award-winning publication whose editorials have been generally supportive of the Illinois senator's presidential candidacy.

While Obama himself had no comment Monday about the cover, a campaign spokesman called it "tasteless and offensive." Obama's presidential opponent, GOP Sen. John McCain, called it "totally inappropriate."

The cover surfaces days after a Newsweek poll found that 12 percent of the respondents still believe that Obama is a practicing Muslim (he is Christian) and another 12 percent believe he "used a Koran for swearing in to the U.S. Senate." The campaign has been so dogged by false rumors about Obama's religion that it set up a Web site devoted to correcting misinformation called FightTheSmears.com.