Media eats itself
For those who don’t know, the New Yorker has caused a minor ruckus in the political world by running a satirical cartoon on its front cover, showing one of the US presidential candidates as a Muslim terrorist, standing in the White House with the US flag burning in the fireplace and a picture of Bin Laden on the mantelpiece.
In the standard unit conversion table of the political internet, one minor ruckus equals nine million anguished blogwords, and the present case is no different.
The scandal itself is not of much consequence - read up on it at the Guardian or CBS if you want the full skinny - but it is a good example of one of the intellectual fallacies of political commentary.
This is the idea that a single comment (or cartoon) is going to make much difference to voters’ attitudes. This fallacy is general, but particularly ridiculous when applied to the New Yorker, a magazine that - as as Gary Kamiya says - only makes the political weather between 110th Street and Canal.
It’s also a fairly patronising fallacy, assuming as it does that citizens in general are mere automatons, much more gullible and easily-led than readers of [your blog name here] (even though they apparently read the New Yorker). To give it a name, let’s call it the ‘outgroup gullibility fallacy’.
The church service used to say ‘fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ - perhaps the online catechism should be ‘respect for others’ intellect is the beginning of wisdom’.