THE BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG
Mark Karlin
Editor and Publisher
July 15, 2008
I tried my mightiest not to write about the appalling and inexcusable New Yorker cover that provides a racist, right-wing stereotyping caricature of the Obamas. From our view, knowing a thing or two about public relations, the decision of The New Yorker editor to run the cover probably included the likelihood of massive free publicity: mission accomplished. So I didn't want to help them out.
But I got a call yesterday from a long-time reader (since 2000) who occasionally e-mails us tips and with whom we have grown close in that Internet sort of way. (I won't reveal his name because he is in the media business in Manhattan and his feeding of information to BuzzFlash could cause his professional life a setback, to say the least.) He was distressed by the cover, in fact in pain. He was concerned that, given that there was no context to the so-called parody (The New Yorker could have had Rush Limbaugh popping pills and hallucinating the image of the Obamas with a contented druggy smile on his face, but the Conde Nast empire and its owners, the Newhouse family, probably doesn't want to offend Rush and his backers), and that a display of bigoted images on newsstands around the country (without any indication except inside the heads of the cartoonist and New Yorker editor that they were meant as "parody") could help further incite racism and a fear of Obama.
Technorati Tags: EditorBlog Obamas New Yorker Arrogance
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