The New Yorker got a lot of heat last week when it featured a cover that lampooned enduring myths about Barack Obama, that had heretofore only been circulated via anonymous emails. The caricature showed Barack in “muslim garb”, fist-bumping his wife, who, with an Angela Davis afro and machine-gun on her back, smiles as an American flag burns in the fireplace and a picture of Osama bin Laden graces the walls.

Was the cover offensive? I don’t think so. As a subscriber to the New Yorker, I understand their taste for satire. Last week’s cover was certainly not denigrating Obama or impugning his or his wife’s patriotism - it is making fun of people who parrot those bigoted memes and believe them to be true. Seeing all of the ultra right-wing fantasies parodied on the same page was, well, really funny.

Not to be outdone by its rival, Vanity Fair published its cover (which it thought was) capturing the same satirical spirit and aesthetic inspiration, but applied this time to McCain. He’s shown with a walker, his wife carrying pill bottles, the Constitution is burning and George W Bush accenting the wall above the mantle. Also funny, but perhaps not quite as aggressive in its caricature - otherwise, Cindy might be lying on the floor with a black eye.

The fact is, though, that McCain doesn’t suffer from anywhere close to the same degree of fabricated rumors as does Barack, having his religion, patriotism and allegiances impugned by political operatives. So, the Vanity Fair cover falls a little flat. I mean, he is old, he does admire Bush, and his wife does have a certain way with pill bottles. The only image that condemns is his burning of the Constitution.

So why did both the Obama and McCain campaigns condemn the Obama cover? It’s clear that too many people don’t understand satire, and will misread the cartoon as a representation of the truth (they might even think it’s a photograph!). Innocent Harry Potter suffered at the hands of a lasting email meme that J.K. Rowling was encouraging satanism among children (it was screamingly funny satire by The Onion, who, in a rare move, took the article off its site).

Good satire should give thinking people something to laugh and reflect about. It can expose and challenge the absurdities that we give thoughtless acceptance to. But not everyone exposed to such images will understand their intent; the danger appears when people accept them at face value. And, in an election where candidates spend hundreds of millions of dollars for mindshare, a satirical image is just bad PR.