"I sense that part of her is keeping her distance from the fray." [New Yorker]

US News and World Report cites research showing—pleasingly for self-satisfied liberals—that followers of the posh magazines and radio stations are smarter than Joe Sixpack and the rest of America's dumb masses. The four "best-informed" news audiences are those of the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's and NPR, according to the news weekly. Um, except not really.

The New Yorker festival culminated in a rockin' dance party. (Our publisher offered us his spare tickets, which we sniffily rejected. "The New Yorker dance party?" snorted a friend.) IvyGate went, though, and they were scared for their future social life. "This could be you in eleven years," warned the headline. "It was mostly professionals in their late 20s to early 30s talking and grinding." Oh, no, not that! Yep, that's how us post-collegiate Olds party. And then we stumbled home, drifting off to sleep imagining what type of hit our Roth IRA took with the latest crash. [IvyGate]

Early Saturday morning I dragged myself to the New Yorker Festival in Midtown, to see media mensch Ken Auletta moderate a panel discussion with Times editor Bill Keller, Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates, Slate press critic Jack Shafer, and breathless WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan, the token conservative. I'll leave out the boring recap parts and distill the experience down to its key point: Peggy Noonan should go back to writing political speeches, because—even taking into account the fact that she's a Republican hack—her dishonesty is embarrassing to watch. Ugh. Noonan, remember, was caught on a live mic talking about how the selection of Sarah Palin as VP was "bullshit." A fact that was referenced repeatedly by Ken Auletta! So what did Noonan spend the bulk of her time on the panel (subject: "Covering the Candidates") doing? Defending Sarah Palin. It was far too early to take notes, but I'll sum up Peggy's arguments: "Sarah Palin, fresh, new, American, real, six-pack, women, sexism?, the American people." The experience was strange because every single person sitting in the room—the panelists, the moderator, the audience, the security guards—was well aware how dumb Sarah Palin is. But there was Peggy, gamely searching for some all-American Reaganesque prose to elevate Palin into something legitimate. The panel was about the media, so the bold political hackery was jarring and out of place, like when those crazy Christians wave signs at the funerals of dead soldiers saying God killed them because of fags. There's a time and a place for your brand of lying, Peggy. It's on the weekend talk shows, after you sign on as a speechwriter for the sure-to-be successful Palin administration. There are lots of political hacks writing columns; but Noonan always wants to pop up as some sort of spokeswoman for Middle America, in the most patronizing way possible to actual Middle Americans. You failed at the New Yorker Festival, Peggy Noonan. The contrast between Noonan and the other panelists was what made the entire ordeal grimace-worthy. Bill Keller has more political pressure on him than almost anyone in the entire media. But when Ken Auletta asked him how it affected him when the McCain campaign charged the Times with being in the tank for Obama, Keller said (approximately): "It makes me want to find the toughest, hardest story about McCain we have and put it on the front page the next day." That's called honesty, Peggy Noonan. Retire with your trademark false grace. [Pic via Startraks]

The New Yorker published its profile of Arianna Huffington. Though disappointingly far from the juicy takedown we hoped for, it does contain a few interesting nuggets. We learn, for example, that the Republican-divorcée-turned-internet-publisher bizarrely "hides" all three of her BlackBerrys in her bathroom at night, even though she lives only with a housekeeper and her two daughters. Her gay ex-husband Michael Huffington elaborates on how she knew of his interest in men before their marriage, saying, "in my Houston town house I sat down with her and told her that I had dated women and men so that she would be aware of it." And Huffington sounds downright proud of her lack of long-term friendships, saying, "I metabolize experiences fast." But there's so much missing, so much that should be in this 14-page story, starting first with how she runs the Huffington Post — would any male mogul be profiled at such length with so little said about how he runs his business? — and continuing through to juicer questions about her dating life and cultlike religious guru. A few specifics:

A previous winner of the New Yorker's cartoon-caption contest once wisely said, ""You are not trying to submit the funniest caption. You are trying to win the New Yorker's caption contest." The magazine's cartoon editor Robert Mankoff explained further in the Times yesterday about the impossible-to-capture essence of a good cartoon caption:

At right is that horribly tasteless New Yorker cover from a few months back, and at left is Entertainment Weekly's new parody cover. There's faux conservopundit Stephen Colbert, dressed as a smirking Michelle "Angela Davis" Obama, terrorist fist-bumping with his old Daily Show boss Jon Stewart, who is clad in Islamobama gear. It's a well-executed (if a tad late) little bit of satire, and an example of just how thoroughly this endless horse race of an election has seeped its way into our idea of "entertainment." Click for (slightly) larger.

The MacArthur Foundation announced its annual Genius Grants today—those no-strings-attached, five year, $500,000 awards that let the best among us pursue their science or art or writing free from the cares of the working world. And look who got one: Alex Ross, the classical music critic for the New Yorker! Ross is certainly deserving when it comes to smarts, if not to finance (he won't be quitting the NYer for a mere 100K per year). But genius knows no financial criteria, despite the jealousy of the poors! Ross says he'll use the cash to help him write his next book, upgrade his website, and "launch some home improvements." God, geniuses are the luckiest people ever. [FBNY]

"i went home an began writin/a suicide note" [New Yorker, New Yorker]

Not all reporters are created equal at Invesco Field, where Barack Obama is about to close out the Democratic National Convention. John Koblin at the Observer printed a seating chart (left) and gave a rundown on the winners and losers. It looks like the Obama campaign continues to snub the New Yorker for its controversial parody cover, sitting the magazine's correspondents in worse seats than Jezebel/Glamour (team Megan!), the Nation and the New Republic. More delightfully, the campaign totally dissed those conssumate insiders at Vanity Fair, "which is stuck in the back row in Section J" behind basically everyone except the Gotham tabloids. Ha ha, I guess the entire free world is not actually obsessed with getting into the Waverly or your damned Oscar party, Graydon Carter! After the jump, early chatter among reporters, plus a list of seating winners.

A New Yorker journalist is calling around for a story on the "Real Arianna Huffington," the Post reported. The scribe is supposedly asking about the allegedly ballooning value of the Huffington Post, recently pegged at $200 million, and about whether publisher Huffington is a "cutthroat boss." Perhaps the New Yorker writer — former New York Post man Ken Auletta? — should ring up HuffPo senior editor Rachel Sklar, who just last night aired news that Huffington spiked her story about MSNBC because she wants to tightly control how politics is discussed on her site. From Sklar's message on Jim Romenesko's Poynter.org forum:

The Olympics: yay, a thing I don't need to add a contextual sentence lest you haven't been watching! Of course you're watching! At this point not having watched the Olympics is like not having heard of September 11. DMX himself knows about it! And NBC just got its best Saturday ratings in 18 years, restoring every last eight hundred forty seven million dollars they fronted for the thing along with the whole notion of American mass media. How did NBC do it? New Yorker television columnist Nancy Franklin has an answer: by appealing to the "lowest common denominator"! (Which is funny, because we thought appealing to the lowest common denominator didn't actually work on the Nielsens anymore unless you multiplied the Nielsen rating by some mysterious inflated self-importance multiplier reflective of the proportion of viewers employed in the New York media.) Franklin kvetches that 2008's "not painfully handcuffed but handcuffed nonetheless" Olympics coverage has been the shlockiest yet in an anachronistically curmudgeonly review that sounds… very New Yorker circa 1990!

The newspaper industry is in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The biggest kiosk seller this month was a highbrow liberal weekly that featured a tabloid satire of a presidential candidate and his wife. The biggest newsmaker this month was a supermarket tabloid that caught a former presidential candidate visiting his extramarital baby mama, and the major journals of record won't even blog about it. Surely this is the End Times of big media. What is to be done? Where are our journalistic standards headed? And how long before what you see above becomes an actual New York Times Magazine cover? It may just be the economy, but all the apocalyptic chatter about the "death of the MSM" is starting seem prescient. For years, newspapers have been struggling to reconcile the Internet's up-to-the-second information spigot with old-fashioned standards of reporting. It's hard to keep track of how many "blogs" the Times now has, or how indistinguishable most of their substance and style are from what you'd find in the print edition. Apart from writing cloyingly and belatedly about the new media revolution and its cultural implications, what has the Gray Lady really done to ensure its continued relevance? Judging by its books, not much—it actually asks more of its shrinking readership. By close of trading Thursday, the stock of the New York Times Co. was listed at $12.48 per share, half the price it was a year ago. The paper then announced it'd be increasing its daily newsstand price by 25 cents, beginning August 18. Oh, the company also posted double-digit losses in ad revenue this quarter, citing the worst month so far as June, with July fast closing in. Circulation is down (profits here are only up because of previous price-gauging), 100 reporters were laid off this year, and everyone's wondering whether the Sulzberger clan will simply call it quits and switch to a small soy agribusiness in northern California. It'd be more wholesome than acknowledging that this century's Huey Long got his freak on. Other media empires are hurting, too. McClatchy Co., Lee Enterprises Inc. and E.W. Scripps Co. all claimed profit falls by almost half of last year's earnings. And most industry analysts expect the locust year to extend into well next. That must mean more bullshit trend pieces.

So then this happened. Vanity Fair, a late yet uninvited guest to the New Yorker cover fiasco, went and drew up this parody of a misunderstood parody. As you can see, it's like taking the square root of comic failure. Not only is McCain not depicted as a caricature of feverish political imagination (he doesn't look half bad here, really), but there's hardly an exaggerated element in the pic, save perhaps the burning Constitution in the fireplace. (It's under secure glass at the National Archives, silly!) Cindy enjoys her pills, the Macs at least like the incumbent well enough to hang a portrait of him, and the walker is only a matter of time. Plus, it sounds as if VF got Wolcott to write this tepid nyuck-nyuck introduction:

After the New Yorker ran its controversial Barack Obama cover satirically mocking smears against the candidate, the presumptive Democratic nominee acted like it really didn't bother him all that much. "It's a cartoon," he told CNN. That seemed very reasonable! But it sounds like Obama was more angry than he let on. The New Yorker was shut out of much-coveted plane tickets for the senator's trip to the Middle East and Europe next week. Neither Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza nor, Politico's Mike Allen confirms via email, anyone else from the magazine is among the 40 journalists blessed with seats. Granted, some 200 people applied for tickets. But given the New Yorker's circulation, influence and often heroic coverage of not only politics but also the war in Iraq (George Packer), U.S. intelligence and covert military operations (Seymour Hersh, Steve Coll), American torture (Jane Mayer) and the inner workings of the Bush administration, it's hard to see the snub as anything other than payback.

Thanks to Wonkette for reminding us that satirical caricatures are so hot right now! A county commissioner running for re-election in Oklahoma sent a comic book to everyone in his district with over-the-top drawings of "pedifiles," "pedaphiles," anal sodomites, the devil and "liberal good ol' boys" all trying to frame him (on felony campaign finance chages). Oh, sure, at first the drawings might look like an old-fashioned nasty smear campaign in cartoon form, rather than sophisticated ironic commentary ala the New Yorker's Barack Obama cover. But this little graphic novella can't help but lampoon itself, what with its portrayal of the full gamut of Christian extremist politicking! Assuming that Times op-ed contributor Timothy Egan was correct about red states having a well-developed sense of satire, Oklahoma City should be certifying gay marriages by Labor Day. More hilarious frames after the jump.

Ex-editor: "I thought it was a perfectly justifiable decision... I personally like it when magazines take on the issues of the day." [Post]

Wondering what to get for the outraged liberal person in your life? Perhaps this person already has a Mother Jones subscription and Arianna Huffington's book and no more room for bumper stickers on the back of their Prius or whatever? Help keep their anger at Daily Kos-commenter levels with a reproduction of the New Yorker's offensive/stupid/ corrosive/overcriticized/whatever Barack and Michelle Obama caricature cover! Prices at the magazine's store range from $29.95 for note cards for bitter poor white Hillary Clinton supporters to $280 for a large framed cover, appropriate for the caviar communists who run Hollywood (or, more likely, for those people's decorators). Give the gift that keeps on feeding extremism, all year 'round! [New Yorker Store]

Were you confused when you woke up Monday and some members of the elite were outraged about something and other members of the elite were not outraged? Internicene elitist warfare! Confusing! If you were like everyone on the internet, your reaction to that New Yorker cover satirizing the rumors about the Obamas went through five steps, from shock on Sunday to acceptance earlier this afternoon. Let us explain!