It was an image meant to raise hackles, and it did: a cartoon on the cover of the New Yorker showing Barack and Michelle Obama — dressed as a Muslim and a gun-toting militant — performing what right-wing commentators have called a ”terrorist fist bump”, while burning the United States flag in the fireplace of an Oval Office decorated with a portrait of Osama bin Laden.
The magazine hit the newsstands on Monday. But its editor, David Remnick, evidently anticipating a liberal backlash against the cover — described on Monday as incendiary and irresponsible — gave an interview to the Washington Post ahead of publication. He said the image was meant to be seen as humour, poking fun at the smear campaign against the Obamas.
”It’s clearly a joke, a parody of these crazy fears and rumours and scare tactics about Obama’s past and ideology,” Remnick told the Post. ”And if you can’t tell it’s a joke by the flag burning in the Oval Office, I don’t know what more to say.”
The accompanying cover story does not discuss the internet smear campaign which has portrayed Obama as a radical Muslim, but traces his rise through Chicago politics in the 1990s.
The satire was evidently lost on the Democratic candidate’s campaign and on his opponent, the Republican, John McCain. Both condemned the cartoon.
”The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create,” the Obama team said in a statement. ”But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.”
Remnick, at least initially, defended the cartoon, and in an exchange with the online liberal news website Huffington Post denied trying to attract attention by deliberately courting controversy.
He also claimed New Yorker readers would be able to discern that the cartoon was meant as satire.
”I wouldn’t have run a cover just to get attention,” he said. ”The idea that we would publish a cover saying these things literally, I think, is just not in the vocabulary of what we do and who we are.” – guardian.co.uk