Jack Shafer in Slate and Gary Kamiya in Salon nail the New Yorker controversy.
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... Only weak thinkers fear strong images. The publication that convenes itself as a polite dinner party, serving only strained polenta and pureed peas, need not invite me to sup.
OK, I differ slightly with the characterization of the cover as a strong image. One complaint about it is that it merely presents the smears without putting the extra spin that would mock them, but New Yorker covers aren't supposed to be jokey and heavy-handed, they're always somewhat genteel, no less so when they're trying to be edgy. It's supposed to elicit a wry smile, not a self-satisfied laugh. Judged on its own terms, rather than Colbert's, the cover clearly succeeds.
Kamiya also notes that some critics say ridiculously say the image doesn't even exaggerate the smears. More Kamiya:
Some on the left, however, are so terrified that Americans, in their cosmic stupidity, cannot distinguish between satire and smear that they reject satire. After Obama wins, they decree, there will be time for all the sophisticated ha-ha. But right now, imagery must be as tightly controlled as at an exhibition of Stalinist realism paintings. As Ari Fleischer said, we must all watch what we do, watch what we say. Such reactions are utterly political and deeply skeptical: They're based on the belief that journalism is all about power, that it must cater to the lowest common denominator, and that the critical and ironic thinking satire requires is an outmoded luxury...
The magazine's left-wing critics, understandably scared (and perhaps deafened) by the vicious noise of the right-wing attack machine, are demanding that those on the left also turn their amps up to full Spinal Tap 11. Cartoons to be chuckled at over sherry, they say, are not funny and are too dangerous. (What they don't say is that when everything is dangerous, nothing is funny.) Ugly times call for ugly tactics. Noise calls for noise.
The premise underlying the response Kamiya takes on here is that The New Yorker (and Jon Stewart, etc) should not do anything to undermine Obama, even if they know and we know it's only a joke. That's pretty pernicious. Since when is it the job of the media or comedians to support a presidential candidate?
Meanwhile the New York Times reports that while the late night laffers are having trouble landing their Obama jokes, black comedians are doing better -- except that due to more ridiculous self-censorship, the paper won't tell you how.
�I tell jokes on stage about him,� Mr. Grier said, reciting a few that would not ever get onto a network late-night show (nor into this newspaper).
Why won't those jokes get into the paper? Do they use profanity, the dreaded N-word or both? In his column last week, Public Editor Clark Hoyt got permission to use the forbidden obscenity "nuts" because it was "central to this discussion." But as I've said again and again, when a story is about a word or a quote, that word or quote is always central to the discussion and should always be used. Hoyt's justification for saying "nuts" could certainly be applied to Sally Field, to take just one egregious example. (Also, it was my understanding that the Public Editor has completely free rein to write what he wants. Why would he need the permission of the editors he's criticizing to criticize them as he sees fit?)
Related: Slate's Christopher Beam finally acknowledges that he started the terrorist fist-jab meme (or rather, the meta-meme) in a column that largely exonerates Fox's E.D. Hill.
