The latest cover of The New Yorker, featuring Barack and Michelle Obama, has prompted a storm of protest, as Suzanne Goldenberg reports. This video clip shows how it is being reported across most of the mainstream US media.
Called "The Politics of Fear," it shows Michelle as a revolutionary in military fatigues, packing an AK-47, and her husband dressed like the Muslim (a false claim he has been denying for months).
It is meant as a satire, to point up the worst of the prejudiced, smearing characterisations that have dogged the couple over the course of the campaign. But satire, as so often, can be read two ways. It has been described as "offensive" and "trash" and "disgusting" and "just as bad as Fox News."
So Rachel Sklar has done a Q&A with David Remnick, the magazine's editor to explain his motives in publishing it.
I ran the cover because I thought it had something to say... it does hold up a mirror to the prejudice and dark imaginings about Barack Obama's - both Obamas' - past, and their politics. I can't speak for anyone else's interpretations, all I can say is that it combines a number of images that have been propagated, not by everyone on the right but by some, about Obama's supposed "lack of patriotism" or his being "soft on terrorism" or the idiotic notion that somehow Michelle Obama is the second coming of the Weathermen or most violent Black Panthers.
Did you consider that it might be co-opted by Obama opponents as anti-Obama propaganda? If so, did that possibility give you pause?
It always occurs to you that things will be misinterpreted or taken out of context. That's not unusual. But I think that's the case of all political satire... The fact is, it's not a satire about Obama - it's a satire about the distortions and misconceptions and prejudices about Obama.
I think this one may well run and run.
