'New Yorker' Cover Furor Fading Fast

You wouldn't know it from all the coverage it's still getting, but the silly nontroversy over The New Yorker's cover depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as terrorists seems to be subsiding.

"New yorker magazine" was the No. 22 Google search on Monday, according to Google Trends, followed closely by "the new yorker obama cover" (No. 24), "new yorker obama cover" (25), "obama new yorker cover" (29), "the new yorker" (37) and "new yorker magazine obama cover" (78). But by yesterday, none of the top 100 searches featured either "obama" or "new yorker."

True enough, the magazine has been getting deluged by calls from angry readers (or, probably more accurately, angry non-readers posing as readers only so they can cancel to threaten their subscriptions). Many of them have been coming in via Michelle Obama Watch, where someone posted the business-side masthead in a discussion forum.

But their outrage is sure to abate with Obama himself now turning down the rhetorical temperature. On Larry King Live last night, he low-toned the imbroglio, saying, "It's a cartoon, Larry."