Obama is certainly experiencing the crucible of presidential electoral politics. On one hand the venerated Jesse Jackson wants to perform a no-cost castration. On the other, the netroots are in a cyber-tizzy over Obama's singing of the FISA bill. Now he has to shake the mainstream media's gleeful exploitation of the "Muslim/ Black-radical meme." This New Yorker cover from Ben Smith's Politico blog highlights how the MSM can use the flimsy justification that the public's belief in "the Muslim thing" is an interesting cultural pheonomenon and thus worthy of treatment.
Of course, if you're going to talk about it, you need a controversial cover because, well, you have to sell magazines. It's a sleazy turn in the coverage of presidential politics. The New Yorker has decided to racialize the Obama's because a small sliver of the U.S. population thinks he's a Muslim. They've given the darker forces of our culture a new laptop screen background.
Of course, if you're going to talk about it, you need a controversial cover because, well, you have to sell magazines. It's a sleazy turn in the coverage of presidential politics. The New Yorker has decided to racialize the Obama's because a small sliver of the U.S. population thinks he's a Muslim. They've given the darker forces of our culture a new laptop screen background.
2 comments:
Did anyone see Ishmael Reed's "Remnick's Latest Blunder?
In light of some of the discussions we've had on "intent," I followed up on his discussion of Robert Crumb as a example of racist rhetoric. The manipulations of content crossing the line from one social structure (or institution, defined as reader/viewership, for example) to another is interesting to me given how fragmented audiences are becoming. The Internet is allowing ruptures of the boundaries, which can be leveraged. The artist, Nico Pitney, was quoted in a Salon.com piece:
"I think the idea that the Obamas are branded as unpatriotic [let alone as terrorists] in certain sectors is preposterous. It seemed to me that depicting the concept would show it as the fear-mongering ridiculousness that it is."
The whole flap smacks of opportunism. I wonder if a satirical cartoon of senile, indecisive McCain in a tiger cage would have been approved. Controversial...yes, but I don't think it would fit any PR strategy.
To me it legitimizes a framing. I hadn't thought about this idea of audiences fragmenting. If this were in the print version of the New Yorker in 1972, things would be different.
Sam Wang at Harvard and an interesting take on the cognitive aspects of satire. He claims that when the brain stores information it does not remember the context when it retrieves it later on. So "unpatriotic Obama" stored as satire is recalled as fact.
So much for the "liberal media." With friends like these....
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