This week's New Yorker cover has become a minor campaign 'event' in itself, bringing a hail of outrage down on the magazine's head from both campaigns. The Obama campaign says the cover is "tasteless and offensive", and the McCain camp agrees.
It's meant to be ironic, innit: a satire on all the crazy flag-burning muslim terrorist fist-bumping rumours that swirl around the Democratic candidate and his wife. Every New Yorker reader will understand that immediately.
But what I think the New Yorker's editor might not have fully thought through is how this image will circulate and be interpreted in the age of the internet. New Yorker readers, or even potential New Yorker readers will form only a minority of its viewers. Most people who see this picture won't have any sense of the New Yorker's liberal, ironic sensibility. They''ll come across it posted on some random blog or as one of the results on a Google Image search, and they will see it as an attack on the Obamas, and be delighted or outraged accordingly. Which is not, I'm sure, what the New Yorker would wish. But images like this just aren't tethered to their context in the way they used to be. I should imagine that's why the Obama campaign is pissed off - they think the New Yorker is being very naive.
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