Jack Shafer rejects the argument that the cartoon will merely reinforce anti-Obama prejudice:
Calling on the press to protect the common man from the potential corruptions of satire is a strange, paternalistic assignment for any journalist to give his peers, but that appears to be what The New Yorker‘s detractors desire.
Forcefully put, but I still think the cover image was a bad idea.
I also think Leonce Gaiter’s take at the Huffington Post is incredibly silly:
The other possibility is that somewhere, deep in the recesses of [the editors’] upper east and west side white minds, lurks a restive “fear of black.” To provide such an image without context is to accept its message to some degree. No similar cartoon would have ever appeared about a white candidate.
That must be it: Even though The New Yorker supports Obama’s candidacy to the hilt, and has run numerous sympathetic profiles and editorials about him over a period of years, deep down they’re all racists who agree with Fox News and want to sink his chances. I mean, upper east and west side? Say no more, they can’t help themselves.
And this in a piece about the harm of stereotyping.
Where is the drawing of the left’s vision of John McCain as an adulterous gold digger, with McCain hiding his current wife behind his first wife’s hospital bed curtain? That analogous image would never appear on a New Yorker cover.
Of course it wouldn’t, because the magazine doesn’t support McCain, and therefore such an image would be correctly perceived as an attack, not a send-up. The irony factor would be zero.
There’s a case to be made that the Obama cover showed a lack of judgment. But the racist double standard argument falls flat.
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