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NEW YORKER COMPARES ITSELF TO 'DAILY SHOW': Editor says Obama cover was no different than satire seen nightly by Jon Stewart.
*New Yorker editor David Remnick talked to CNN's Wolf Blitzer Monday about the controversy over its current cover depicting Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as Osama bin-Laden-loving terrorists.
Remnick said the artist rendering was no different than what the "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" do every weeknight on Comedy Central. He said the point of the cover was to satirize the many right-wing rumors that have spread virally about the Democratic candidate.
Blitzer said the cover looked like the type of drawing that would cover a "neo-Nazi or Ku Klux Klan" publication. Remnick bristled: "Oh, come on, Wolf. It's on the New Yorker, and context means a lot." Remnick said that people "know the New Yorker," that it's a liberal publication that often uses provocative humor to make its points.
"If it weren't possible to have satire," Remnick continued, "if you always have to look for the joke that everyone will get, then you don't have Jon Stewart, you don't have Stephen Colbert. Colbert goes on TV and mocks right-wing commentary by pretending to be a right-wing commentator. In a way, this is Colbert in print."
In an interview with the New York Times about the magazine cover, Colbert said that a running joke on his show has been that Obama is a "secret Muslim"; the New Yorker cover, he said, was consistent with that. "It's a completely valid satirical point to make — and it's perfectly valid for Obama not to like it," he said.
Colbert said he has had more leeway to joke about Obama than other late-night hosts because "my character on the show doesn't like him. I'm expected to be hostile to him."
"The Daily Show's" Jon Stewart, who is also an executive producer of "The Colbert Report," said the Obama campaign's reaction to the New Yorker cover seemed part of what is now almost a pro forma cycle in political campaigns. "Nothing can occur without the candidate responding," he said.
Bill Maher, who is host of a politically oriented late-night show on HBO, said, "If you can't do irony on the cover of The New Yorker, where can you do it?"
Related article: Obama says New Yorker insulted Muslim Americans
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