Charles Apple

The alternative weekly Chicago Reader took heat today for the cover of its new issue — a drawing of President-Elect Barack Obama.

…With the caption: Don’t screw this up:

Reader editor Alison True explains:

The callers told me we’re assuming he’ll screw up because he’s black. To the contrary, we have extremely high hopes for him.

But no matter how jubilant some of us may feel about his election, the media’s role isn’t to cheerlead for elected officials. We serve our readers: we’re observers and reporters and commentators. We were addressing Obama as the person — not the black person — whom we’ve handed an important new job and letting him know that even though we put him there, we’ll be watching. Would you expect anything else?

Surely the Reader expected the complaints. I mean, come on.

To its credit, though, the Reader revealed it had also prepared a John McCain cover — just in case:

To the Reader’s discredit, Reader reader “Eric Z” points out this ad he found at the bottom of the web page in which the Reader explained the covers:

The cover illustrations are by Derek Erdman. Read about the covers here. Read the editor’s defense of them today here.

Likewise, here is the cover of this week’s issue of Seattle Weekly:

Here is the cover the Weekly says it would have run, had Obama lost:

Romenesko was first with both stories.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 11:16 am and is filed under Amusing stuff, Elections, Free publications, Illustration, Magazine design, News design, Newspapers, VizEds Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.