I read that John McCain was recently greeted at an airport by a grand total of one reporter. Meanwhile, Barack Obama is cruising the globe with a network TV anchors attached to him like remoras on a whale shark. I mostly fault so-called TV journalists for this disturbing imbalance, but I'm seeing an awful lot of print publications running more Obama stories over McCain ones. The argument they would make is that Obama is a walking, talking news story because of his race, which is certainly true. It's wonderful that a black man will soon officially become a major-party candidate for president -- and one that stands a very good chance of winning in November. But however amazing the whole Obama saga is, there's still another major candidate in this election: McCain. Because we are human, journalists are incapable of being unbiased. But we are all taught that we should do our best to minimize the influence of bias by writing balanced stories. That same principle needs to apply to deciding news coverage, too.

Of course, this is all coming from a guy whose job is to draw biased and unbalanced cartoons every day!

I futzed around with the wording for this cartoon all day. It started out with Obama saying, "I don't understand why this cartoon is considered funny!" and the Average Joe guy saying, "Duh. It's a New Yorker cartoon." It didn't quite do it for me or anyone else I asked. The crux of the cartoon is that New Yorker cartoons often leave people scratching their heads trying to figure where the laugh is. Their cover on Obama isn't really funny or effective satire. That said, I would never say they shouldn't try to run covers like these. Obama needs to relax. If he's elected president, he'll likely see plenty of "offensive" and "tasteless" cartoons about him all over the place. The same for McCain. They may not like it, but it comes with the territory when you run for president.