News Index
John McCain lagged significantly behind In many of the weeks since he effectively clinched the nomination on Super Tuesday, McCain has been on the losing side of a battle for headlines. Even last week, according to PEJ’s Campaign Coverage Index, he was a significant or dominant factor in 35% of the campaign stories from April 7-13, trailing both Clinton (56%) and Obama (46%). But that 35% also marked McCain’s highest level of coverage since Feb. 18-24 when the New York Times ran a widely criticized story suggesting an inappropriate relationship between him and a female lobbyist. Sometimes, moreover, it’s the nature of the coverage rather than the level that counts. Last week, the largest element of campaign coverage involved a subject that McCain has staked his presidential bid on—the Iraq war. Coverage of General David Petraeus’ report to Congress accounted for 14% of all campaign coverage. (This re-focus on the debate over Iraq is one reason why the race for the White House had its lowest week of coverage in 2008.) Although McCain is in the position of supporting an unpopular war, he fared pretty well in the media’s analysis of how the three candidates handled Petraeus’ presentation. And he was bolstered by a poll that showed the public trusts him more than Clinton or Obama when it comes to handling Iraq, despite that position. The Arizona Senator also benefited from some media speculation about a vice-presidential running mate that included the name of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. That helps remind voters that McCain is the only one of the three presidential contenders certain to be on the November ballot.
Obama was a beneficiary of those Clinton problems—that is until he generated his own controversy that surfaced with an April 11 Huffington Post report on a fundraiser in San Francisco five days earlier. There Obama said that people in small towns who feel economically disenfranchised “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” That statement was quickly criticized as elitist and patronizing by both Clinton and McCain. By the end of the week, the “bitter” remarks had accounted for 8% of all the campaign coverage and Obama was on the defensive. The Democrats seemed to be caught up in a game of gaffe ping-pong, with the media eagerly keeping score.
The Campaign Coverage index is an addition to PEJ’s NCI report, which tracks what stories the media covered in the previous week. The CCI offers a greater level of detail of the campaign coverage. That includes the percentage of stories in which a candidate played a significant role (as a subject of between 25% and 50% of the story) or a main newsmaker role (making up at least 50% of the story). The Index also identifies the key narratives in the reporting and the “Line of the Week,” a statement from a journalist or source that in our researchers’ estimation seems either to capture the story or is particularly colorful. PEJ’s News Coverage Index will not disappear. It will come at the bottom of the CCI. If General Petraeus’ visit to Washington last week gave the presidential candidates a chance to distinguish themselves on Iraq, the media post-mortems pretty much called it a three-way tie. In evaluating the political impact of the Petraeus testimony, CNN’s Candy Crowley declared on April 8 that all the candidates “came away with something” beneficial to their campaigns.
Two days later on MSNBC, Hardball’s Chris Matthews rolled out a survey showing that when asked who they trust on Iraq, the public picked McCain by a 54% to 40% margin over Obama and Clinton. In trying to explain a war-weary public’s embrace of the hawkish McCain, NBC’s Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert noted that “national security has always been the Achilles’ Heel for Democrats. [Citizens] believe the war was a mistake. They do want to get out. But Americans hate to lose.” On April 11, an AP story posted on AOL.com had more positive poll results for McCain. He had pulled into a tie in a match-up with Obama, erasing what had been a 10-point deficit.
Clinton began her week trying to dig out from the bad news about Mark Penn, which the April 7 New York Times called “the latest upheaval in a campaign that has seen its manager replaced, faced critical money shortages and has often lagged behind Senator Barack Obama…in a cohesive message and ground strategy.” The Penn saga accounted for 8% of the week’s campaign stories and a few days later, Clinton had to perform damage control after her husband’s unhelpful remarks about Bosnia. Bill Clinton’s decision to resurrect that Bosnia sniper story with an error-laden defense of his wife helped make him a dominant or significant factor in 10% of last week’s stories. “The Bill Clinton factor,” declared CBS anchor Harry Smith on the April 11 newscast. “He tries to explain Hillary’s statements about her Bosnia trip, but only makes things worse. Now she tells him to zip it.”
But the surfacing of Obama’s “bitter” remarks during the California fundraiser quickly changed the focus of coverage. “Outrage tonight after Senator Obama blasts small town America,” declared substitute host Kitty Pilgrim at the outset of Lou Dobbs’ April 11 CNN program. “And those remarks could seriously damage Senator Obama’s campaign.” And now, in the rest of the week’s news: There were several significant news events last week that competed with the campaign for media attention. Thanks to the Petraeus visit to Congress, the Iraq policy debate was the second-biggest story of the week, filling 10% of the newshole as measured by PEJ’s News Coverage Index for April 7-13. That marked the highest level of coverage of the Iraq debate in 2008. (But it’s worth noting that when Petraeus delivered a much-awaited Iraq progress report to Congress on Sept. 10, the Iraq debate coverage filled 36% of the newshole that week.) The Beijing Olympics was next at 9%, with the story driven by the protests centered around the global travels of the Olympic torch. The raid on a polygamist sect compound in Texas was next at 7%, followed by the issue of airline travel (6%) after the cancellation of numerous flights last week for safety inspections.
Media Exposure by Candidate
Top Overall Stories of the Week
Click here to see the top ten stories for each media sector. Click here to see the methodology for the Campaign Coverage Index
Even though talk hosts enjoy a great deal
 of editorial license, several radio talkers found out last week that there still boundaries that can’t be crossed without consequences.
Liberal talker Ed Schultz provoked controversy and a rebuke from Barack Obama, after Schultz called John McCain a “warmonger” during an April 4 North Dakota fundraiser at which Obama spoke. (Obama’s campaign disavowed those remarks, just as McCain criticized conservative radio host Bill Cunningham in February for using a GOP rally to call Obama a “hack” and repeatedly use his middle name, Hussein.) Another liberal host, Randi Rhodes—no fan of Hillary Clinton—got in even deeper when she used profanity to describe the former First Lady during a stand-up routine in San Francisco in late March. Air America Radio, Rhodes’ employer, suspended her for those remarks last week. Then, on April 10, Air America announced Rhodes’ decision to leave the liberal talk network where she was one of the top names. While both Schultz and Rhodes ran into trouble for words uttered outside their talk studios, they also sounded off on their day jobs. On her March 31 program, Rhodes attacked Clinton’s recollection—later acknowledged to be inaccurate—about dodging sniper fire during a 1996 flight to Bosnia. Referring to the CBS footage that refuted Clinton’s account, Rhodes called her story a “big stinkin’ lie…Every single solitary airport landing I have ever had has been more traumatic than what I saw on the video in Tuzla.” A day later, Schultz spoke about money problems in the Clinton campaign and warned that the “prolonged presidential primary [is] starting to deplete some of the resources for some of these other races” in the 2008 campaign. That’s an argument used by some who are trying to persuade the New York Senator to drop out in the interests of party unity and success. But any suggestion that Clinton depart the race at this point was anathema to radio host Rush Limbaugh. “Why should she end her campaign?” he asked on March 31. “It’s America. Let every vote count.” Limbaugh—a staunch conservative and frequent Clinton critic—has his own motives. He has been touting his “Operation Chaos,” which involves urging Republicans to cross over and vote for Clinton as a way of keeping the Democratic primary fight from being resolved and preventing the party from unifying. Last week, the presidential campaign—with its focus on the Obama-Clinton battle—dominated the talk show airwaves. According to PEJ’s Talk Show Index for the week of March 31-April 6, a full 72% of cable and radio talk airtime examined was devoted to the campaign. (You had to drop all the way down to 3% to find the next biggest topic, immigration.) That’s more than double the media attention given to the campaign (32% of the newshole) in the general News Index last week. PEJ’s Talk Show Index is designed to provide news consumers, journalists and researchers with hard data about what stories and topics are most frequently dissected and discussed in the media universe of talk and opinion—a segment of the media that spans across both prime time cable and radio. (See About the Talk Show Index.) PEJ’s Talk Show Index includes six prime time cable shows and five radio talk hosts and is a subset of our News Coverage Index. One of the key story lines in last week’s campaign coverage was the question of whether Clinton should end her campaign. And for a number of talk hosts, especially conservatives who are not likely to embrace either Clinton or Obama in the general election, that increasing pressure on Clinton was a way of broaching another favorite subject—bias in the news media. For now at least, that made them something of allies of convenience with a Clinton campaign that has been complaining about unfair press treatment for many months. On his Fox News Channel program, Bill O’Reilly went after the “newspaper columnists…in the tank for Senator Obama [who] wrote pretty much the same thing—Hillary Clinton can’t win and is hurting the Democratic Party by staying in the race.” “There is no doubt Barack Obama is the favorite of many media outlets,” O’Reilly added. “But no journalists should be taking marching orders from any campaign.” Limbaugh told his listeners that key elements of the “Democrat Party and the American left” are bringing “all kinds of pressure…on Mrs. Clinton.” To illustrate his point, he cited a recent spate of news stories reporting that the Clinton campaign had millions of dollars in unpaid debts to vendors. No one spoke more bluntly than CNN’s Lou Dobbs, who on his April 1 show, declared that “I have never seen in my career greater favoritism being applied in the national media, broadly speaking, [than] in behalf of Senator Obama and against Senator Clinton.” “We in the national media have played along with this pro-Obama nonsense a very, very long time,” Dobbs added. The message was very different on the April 1 edition of MSBC’s Countdown, with Keith Olbermann, a liberal cable talker who has at times been quite critical of the Clinton campaign. In a comment that cited a key argument of the advocates for a Clinton withdrawal—that she can’t win and is only damaging the party’s November hopes by fighting it out—Olbermann talked about “Clinton’s decision to stay in the race despite apparently insurmountable math against her.” No doubt some of Olbermann’s fellow talkers will see that as another example of the pro-Obama media bias. And we may have to wait until the eventual contest between John McCain and the Democratic nominee before the talk hosts reveal their true ideological colors. Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ Top Ten Stories in the broader News Coverage Index 1. 2008 Campaign - 32% 2. U.S. Economy - 9%3. Events in Iraq - 5% 4. Zimbabwe Elections - 3% 5. Martin Luther King Anniversary - 3% 6. Plane Safety - 3% 7. Bush's trip to Europe - 2% 8. U.S. Domestic Terrorism and Efforts to Combat - 2% 9. Federal Reserve Regulatory Changes - 2% 10. Iraq Homefront - 2% Click here to read the methodology behind the Talk Show Index.
Barack Obama attracted the most coverage
 of any presidential hopeful last week, and John McCain’s biographical tour helped him climb back into the headlines. But it was Hillary Clinton who generated the clearest story line in the media last week in advance of the April 22 Pennsylvania primary.
The narrative was the debate over whether it might be time for Clinton to throw in the towel in the nomination fight. It was the single biggest campaign story line, accounting for 7% of all the campaign stories last week, and it was big enough that Clinton herself fought back by embracing one of Philly’s fictional favorites. The indomitable Rocky Balboa not only withstood the hardest blows of Ivan Drago and Clubber Lang, he managed to battle his way through five sequels to the 1976 Oscar-winning film. “Let me tell you something, when it comes to finishing a fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common,” said Clinton. “I never quit.” Clinton wasn’t the No. 1 campaign newsmaker last week. Overall, she was a significant or dominant factor in 55% of the campaign stories studied last week in PEJ’s Campaign Coverage Index, narrowly trailing Obama, at 56%. But much of that news for the former First Lady wasn’t good. Among the story topics that got picked up, March tallies showed Obama outraising her $40 million to $20 million. He also gained some key endorsements, including that of 9/11 Commission vice-chairman Lee Hamilton and ex-President Jimmy Carter, who offered (very) thinly veiled support. And Obama continued to hold a lead over Clinton in national polling while cutting into her advantage in Pennsylvania. It wasn’t all good news for Obama, however. His Keystone State campaign included an ill-fated bowling exhibition in which he rolled a 37 in 7 frames—and average of 2.6 pins per ball. Despite that pitiful outcome, the bowling escapade fit the Obama story line last week, which focused on his decision to move away from high-tone set speeches in large settings in favor of doing more small-bore, personalized campaigning.
Meanwhile, presumptive GOP nominee McCain racked up his highest level of coverage since the week of Feb. 18-24. McCain was significant or dominant factor in 30% of the campaign stories studied last week. One vehicle for generating that attention was the tour of significant places from McCain’s past, which was designed to re-introduce him to voters and focus attention on his heroic biography.
Overall, the Presidential race was the top story, accounting for 32% of all the coverage measured by PEJ’s News Coverage Index for March 31-April 6. But with a break in the primary schedule and election coverage easing off somewhat in recent weeks, a disparity has emerged among media sectors. Last week, the campaign was the No. 2 story both on newspaper front pages (where it filled 13% of the newshole) and online (at 14%). Instead, the coverage now is really being driven by cable (62%) and radio (46%), where the talk show/talking head culture in both platforms is focused on chewing over whatever the latest campaign controversy may be. The Campaign Coverage index is an addition to PEJ’s NCI report, which tracks what stories the media covered in the previous week. The CCI offers a greater level of detail of the campaign coverage. That includes the percentage of stories in which a candidate played a significant role (as a subject of between 25% and 50% of the story) or a main newsmaker role (making up at least 50% of the story). The Index also identifies the key narratives in the reporting and the “Line of the Week,” a statement from a journalist or source that in our researchers’ estimation seems either to capture the story or is particularly colorful. PEJ’s News Coverage Index will not disappear. It will come at the bottom of the CCI. For much of last week, Clinton was in “Rocky” mode, vowing to keep on despite being behind on the scorecards. In a March 31 Good Morning America story, Jake Tapper reported that the Clinton campaign had amassed almost $9 million in unpaid debts to vendors and was sparking fears among some party officials that her only path to victory involved “destroying Barack Obama.” Still, as Tapper noted, “Senator Clinton has a message for all those Democrats pushing her towards the exit. She ain’t goin’ anywhere.” The next day, MSNBC’s Abrams, in keeping with the pugilistic metaphors, acknowledged Clinton’s desire to fight on, but added, “It sure feels like the referee, Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean, wants to call the fight early.”
Near the end of the week, the Clintons did change the subject by going public on April 4 with their long-awaited tax filings. The fact that they had earned $109 million in eight years was both impressive and perhaps a little awkward for a candidate who has made the beleaguered blue-collar working-class the centerpiece of her campaign. An April 5 New York Times story seemed to allude to this when it reported on a Clinton speech in North Dakota attacking George Bush’s tax cuts for favoring the rich. “My husband, much to my surprise and his, has made a lot of money since he left the White House, by doing what he loves doing most—talking to people,” the Times quoted Clinton as saying. “But we didn’t ask for George Bush’s tax cuts. We didn’t want them and we didn’t need them.” The Obama media narrative was relatively uneventful last week, except perhaps, for the parade of gutter balls in Altoona. Airing the video on his March 31 Hardball show, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews provided the play-by-play, studying Obama’s delivery and declaring, “Look at this. This isn’t exactly the right form.” A chunk of the coverage was devoted to the changes in style and rhetoric that Obama adopted in Pennsylvania, a state teeming with the older white working-class voters that he has trouble reaching. A New York Times story posted on MSNBC.com on April 1 reported that Obama “is grounding his lofty rhetoric in the more prosaic language of white-working-class discontent, adjusting it to the less welcoming terrain of Pennsylvania. His preferred communication now is the town-hall-style meeting.” That theme was also featured in an April 3 Philadelphia Inquirer story that began by reporting that Obama had “sipped a Yuengling in Latrobe; fiddled with a Slinky in Johnstown…fed a calf in State College…and nibbled on cheese at Philadelphia’s Italian Market.” It was part of a six-day tour across the state credited with helping to cut Clinton’s lead there from about 16 points to single digits. But the story did mention that Obama visited a market and tried a Spanish ham that sold for $99.99 a pound, a delicacy no doubt beyond the reach of many voters. John McCain tried to create his own story with his “Service to America” tour last week. But he wasn’t in total control of the narrative. ABC’s March 31 evening newscast made note of his visit to a Mississippi where he was a naval flight instructor, but anchor Charles Gibson called it a “carefully orchestrated campaign swing.” And the brief McCain piece came after a much longer look at the Democratic fight in Pennsylvania. An April 2 story in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette on McCain’s strategy recounted his visit back to his old Alexandria Virginia boarding school where he was nicknamed, among other things, “Punk” and “McNasty.” On his April 1 program, CNN’s Lou Dobbs, illustrated the difficulties McCain still faces in getting the public to focus on his candidacy. After a long discussion of the Obama-Clinton race, Dobbs introduced a segment on McCain’s campaign by declaring, “Senator McCain…Yes, the Republican is actually in this race as well.” And now, in the rest of the week’s news: After the campaign, the No. 2 story, according to last week’s News Coverage Index, was the troubled U.S. economy at 9% of the newshole. Fueled by the Treasury’s Department proposal for a sweeping overhaul of regulatory powers and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s use of the R-word (Recession), the economy was the No. 1 story online and in newspapers, at 14% of the newshole. That was followed by events on the ground in Iraq (5%), which dropped from 12% the previous week. The contested elections in Zimbabwe were next at 3%, while remembrances of Martin Luther King surrounding the 40th anniversary of his murder followed behind, also at 3%.
Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ
Media Exposure by Candidate
Top Overall Stories of the Week
Click here to see the top ten stories for each media sector. Click here to see the methodology for the Campaign Coverage Index
In the seemingly stalemated race for the Democratic nomination,
 there seems to be a clear relationship recently between the level of coverage for a presidential candidate and the tone. And the recent campaign media narratives strongly suggest that, at the moment, bad news is big news.
Last week it was Hillary Clinton’s turn to be examined in the media’s stare. The fallout from her oft-repeated story about encountering sniper fire during a 1996 trip to Bosnia, and the later acknowledgement that she “misspoke,” helped make Clinton the leading campaign newsmaker of the week. As measured by PEJ’s Campaign Coverage Index March 24-30, she was a significant or dominant factor in 63% of the week’s campaign stories. Rival candidate Barack Obama trailed at 54%. That marks a major turnaround from the previous week when 72% of the stories were significantly or predominantly about Obama, and Clinton lagged far behind at 30%. Then it was Obama on the hot seat as he delivered a high-stakes March 18 speech designed to minimize the political damaged cause by the widely circulated and inflammatory remarks of his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Obama was still dealing with the Wright flap last week, but it had subsided noticeably, and what there was more than matched by Clinton and the Bosnia dustup, which accounted for 14% of the week’s campaign stories. Once again, the still-contested Democratic race dominated the media’s attention, generating about six times the number of stories as the Republicans. But much of the news was negative. And the subtext never far from the surface was the increasing bad blood between the Obama and Clinton camps. That included a Bill Clinton remark that Obama’s campaign interpreted as questioning his patriotism and James Carville’s comparison of Bill Richardson—who had endorsed Obama—to Judas Iscariot. As the week went on, Democrats’ mounting fears of a self-destructive primary battle led to some stories featuring calls for Clinton to leave the race.
“Is John McCain getting a free ride because of the intense spotlight on the Obama-Clinton campaign?” asked Chris Matthews on his March 25 program. Perhaps, he added, McCain’s support for an unpopular Iraq war would be getting more attention “if the Democrats weren’t tearing each other apart.” Last week, the 2008 campaign filled 34% of the overall newshole, as measured by PEJ’s News Coverage Index from March 24-30. Though still accounting more than one-third of all the news examined, that represents the second lowest weekly coverage level since the primary season began in January. Once again, cable television, which devoted 62% of its airtime to the campaign, decisively outstripped any other media sector in the intensity of coverage.
One turning point in last week’s media narrative came when Clinton admitted being wrong about her claims of Bosnia sniper fire, an account contradicted by video showing her landing without incident and being greeted by a child. The March 25 CBS Evening News highlighted Clinton’s problem by airing footage from several occasions when she talked of her dangerous arrival in Bosnia. Noting that the CBS video of the actual event was the most viewed item on YouTube in the past 24 hours, anchor Harry Smith asked this damning question: “In the end, doesn’t this really come down to a matter of ‘can you trust what she says?’” That same day, AOL News posted an Associated Press story on the sniper snafu and included an online poll question asking people whether they thought Clinton exaggerated her experience a lot, a little, or not at all. One of the reasons Rev. Wright stayed in the news last week was because Clinton broke her silence on the matter to declare that he would not have been her pastor. In a March 26 Good Morning America report, correspondent Jake Tapper noted that “Clinton went for the jugular [on Wright], for the first time personally injecting him into the race” after she had “been on the ropes” over the Bosnia story. As the Wright issue continued to percolate, Obama again addressed their relationship in a March 28 appearance on ABC’s program, The View. Obama stated he would have left the church “had the reverend not retired and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate...” The Wright saga, in all its incarnations, accounted for 11% of the campaign stories last week, down considerably from 37% the previous week.
On his March 24 Fox News Channel Show, Bill O’Reilly summed up the situation by saying, “Governor Richardson is Judas, Obama might not love the USA and President Clinton is Joe McCarthy. And all of that is Democrat against Democrat.” Against that backdrop came a March 27 Boston Globe story reporting that, “More party leaders are saying that the increasingly personal crossfire between the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaigns serves only to write the script for Republican ads in the fall and to give John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, a head start in framing his candidacy.” Given some louder rumblings about pressuring Clinton to abandon the race, and after Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean called for a July 1 end to the nomination battle, the week ended with yet another twist in the story line—one that suggested the fight was far from over and possibly foreshadowing the days ahead. “Clinton Vows To Stay in Race To Convention,” was the headline on the March 30 front-page story in The Washington Post. And now, in the rest of the week’s news: While generating only about one-third as much coverage as the campaign, the situation inside Iraq filled 12% of the newshole last week, according to PEJ’s News Coverage Index. (That is three times more coverage than events in Iraq had received in any other week in 2008.) Between the grim milestone of 4,000 U.S. military deaths and the flare-up of the fighting around Basra, Iraq bloodshed virtually tied the campaign as the No. 1 story in the newspaper sector and filled 20% of the newshole online. The war was followed by the troubled U.S. economy (7%), relations with China (3%), which was driven by the Tibetan upheaval, and the Iraq policy debate (3%), Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ
Media Exposure by Candidate
Top Overall Stories of the Week
Click here to see the top ten stories for each media sector. Click here to see the methodology for the Campaign Coverage Index
For once, the fractious fraternity of talk show hosts was united about something last week—Barack Obama’s ability to put words together.
“His speech was excellent,” On Dan Abrams’ MSNBC program, Democratic strategist Laura Schwartz declared it “an amazing speech in a great context.” Her counterpart, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson characterized it as “a smart speech…an interesting speech.” On his radio show, liberal host Ed Schultz gushed that Obama’s address had “taken it to another level.” Across the dial, even conservative talk powerhouse Rush Limbaugh called it “flowery and fabulous and well-delivered”—without much hint of mockery. If it seemed like Obama’s big speech—often characterized as his most important of the campaign—was the only subject on pundits’ minds last week, that’s not far wrong. According to PEJ’s Talk Show Index for March 17-23, the presidential campaign accounted for an astounding 83% of all the airtime on the cable and talk radio shows examined. (That more than doubled the 39% of the general newshole filled by the campaign.) And last week, the focus on the campaign trail was on the Obama/Wright relationship and the Illinois Senator’s effort to try and explain it. (A new survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found the public has paid more attention to the Wright sermons and the Obama speech than to any other campaign-related events.) But despite widespread appreciation for Obama’s rhetorical skills across the ideological spectrum, there were significant differences in the talk show world over its substance. And those differences centered on Wright, whose racially divisive and anti-American sentiments were widely disseminated on video in recent days. That created an environment in which Obama apparently felt the risk of not responding to those words outweighed the potential downside of bringing the issue front and center in a major address. When the speech was over, supporters thought Obama had candidly and convincingly repudiated Wright’s divisive rhetoric in a bold discussion of race. Detractors insisted he had not gone far enough to distance himself from a man they deemed hateful and dangerous. Declaring Wright’s role is “to sow hatred…to make people fear their government,” Carlson added: “Here’s Barack Obama defending him…How can you defend that?” “Jeremiah Wright is a hatemonger. He hates America,” added Limbaugh. “It is patently obvious Barack Obama sought to excuse that today in ways that I found a little bit troubling.” Others saw the speech, not as troubling, but as uplifting. And it didn’t break down completely along party lines. On Fox, former Republican Congressman and presidential candidate Jack Kemp said, “I thought he gave a wonderful speech…I…don’t believe in guilt by association.” “This is Senator Obama just tellin’ it like it is about Reverend Wright,” said Schultz. “He always seems to find a higher ground.” Appearing on MSNBC, actress and social commentator Nancy Giles called the speech “a very honest and necessary conversation” about race relations. PEJ’s Talk Show Index is designed to provide news consumers, journalists and researchers with hard data about what stories and topics are most frequently dissected and discussed in the media universe of talk and opinion—a segment of the media that spans across both prime time cable and radio. (See About the Talk Show Index.) PEJ’s Talk Show Index includes six prime time cable shows and five radio talk hosts and is a subset of our News Coverage Index. In assessing reaction to the Obama speech, it is worth noting that in the often black-and-white world of talk shows, some pundits did deliver a more neutral and dispassionate verdict. On MSNBC, Newsweek’s Howard Fineman, tried to parse the speech from a purely political angle. While acknowledging that “it was masterfully put together,” Fineman noted that “it’s a risky maneuver cause he embraced, in the end, Reverend Wright…Did this speech win over any of the voters he did not have?” One talk host who offered a distinctly nuanced review was the Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly. On his March 18 show, O’Reilly said “the senator’s speech was a mixed deal,” noting that “he was right that race remains an unresolved problem in America…The senator is also correct when he said Rev. Wright’s anti-American statements were misguided and driven by an obsolete view of he country.” On the other hand, added O’Reilly, “Obama was weak in explaining why he continues to publicly support Wright.” Summing up, O’Reilly called Obama “a positive force in America, but many questions remain about him.” It’s not likely they all got answered in last week’s pundit post-mortems.
While the cable and radio talk shows devoted 83% of their time to the campaign last week, that was nearly matched by the cable news universe, which turned over 73% of its newshole to the election. (That broader cable universe includes the prime-time talk shows, but other prime-time news programming and some daytime news coverage as well.) Among the three major cable news networks, the differences in amount of election coverage last week were relatively modest. MSNBC, with its heavy emphasis on politics, spent 82% of its time on the campaign compared to 71% for CNN and 68% for the Fox News Channel, according to the programs examined in PEJ’s News Coverage Index. When it came to the percentage of total airtime the cable nets devoted specifically to the Wright/Obama controversy, one network did stand out. While CNN spent 25% and MSNBC devoted 24% of their total news coverage to that subject, the Fox News Channel was considerably more focused on that story. Fox spent 43% of its airtime talking about the Wright/Obama furor last week.
Top Ten Stories in the broader News Coverage Index 1. 2008 Campaign - 39% 2. U.S. Economy - 16% 3. China - 5%4. Iraq Policy Debate - 5% 5. Midwest Storms - 4% 6. Events in Iraq - 3% 7. Iraq Homefront - 2% 8. Spitzer Scandal / New York Governor - 2% 9. Supreme Court Actions - 1% 10. War on Terror - 1% Click here to read the methodology behind the Talk Show Index.
It was, to put it simply, the week of “the speech.”
The 37-minute address on race delivered by Barack Obama March 18 at Philadelphia’s Constitution Center dominated last week’s campaign narrative in the press. While the subject was race relations in America, there were so many subtexts it was hard for the press to know where to begin. First, there was the broader context of political damage control. There was also the fate of the battle for the Democratic nomination. But perhaps the most intriguing element was watching the media culture try to deal with a speech that was so complex it defied the TV panel debate, the skills of the veteran political writer or the parameters of a 90-second nightly news segment. The numbers alone tell much of the tale. First, Obama utterly dominated the media narrative. He was a significant or dominant figure in 72% of last week’s campaign coverage. That was more than twice as many stories as Hillary Clinton, at 30%. Not only was it Obama’s highest coverage level in 2008, it was Clinton’s lowest since mid-January, when both parties still had multi-candidate presidential fields. And that was despite last week’s much-anticipated National Archives release of thousands of pages of records of Clinton’s activities as First Lady. Despite presumptive GOP nominee John McCain’s high-profile Mideast mission to burnish his national security credentials, that trip played second fiddle to the Wright controversy as well. McCain registered at only 17% of the campaign coverage as Democrats generated almost 12 times the media attention as Republicans did last week. Obama was forced to give the address after almost a week of the media running video clips featuring racially inflammatory and anti-American rhetoric of the candidate’s long-time pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
But the two men were inextricably linked. More than a third (37%) of the week’s campaign stories focused on the Obama/Wright relationship and its fallout. By contrast, the dilemma over what to do with Florida’s and Michigan’s early-voting primary contests accounted for 11% of the week’s election stories.
But at least the subject had moved on some. The high-risk Philadelphia speech came after several days of what one network correspondent described as Obama “damage control” to try and counter political fallout from the Wright sermons. His mission, as enunciated by ABC’s Charles Gibson on his March 17 newscast, was to walk “the fine line…as he embraces his religion while trying to distance himself from the fiery pastor of his Chicago church.” Aside from those who saw it live on cable or watched or read excerpts, the speech was also viewed about 2.5 million times on YouTube in the first 72 hours after it was delivered, according to media reports. The controversy also elevated the campaign in the news again. Driven by the Wright/Obama drama, the presidential race had a coverage comeback last week, filling 39% of the newshole as measured by PEJ’s News Coverage Index from March 17-23. (The previous week, the campaign had dropped to 27% of the coverage studied, the 2008 low-water mark.) One clear indicator of how much fodder the Wright controversy provided for the pundits and partisans was in the media sector breakdown of coverage. Campaign coverage filled 29% of the network newshole, 23% of the online newshole, and 16% of the front page newspaper space. But it accounted for 73% of the airtime on cable and 53% on radio, the two sectors that include a heavy diet of political talk shows. The Campaign Coverage index is an addition to PEJ’s NCI report, which tracks what stories the media covered in the previous week. The CCI offers a greater level of detail of the campaign coverage. That includes the percentage of stories in which a candidate played a significant role (as a subject of between 25% and 50% of the story) or a main newsmaker role (making up at least 50% of the story). The Index also identifies the key narratives in the reporting and the “Line of the Week,” a statement from a journalist or source that in our researchers’ estimation seems either to capture the story or is particularly colorful. PEJ’s News Coverage Index will not disappear. It will come at the bottom of the CCI. As soon as Obama finished his March 18 speech—one delivered against the backdrop of eight American flags—the media shifted into reaction mode. Yet the speech was so intricate and challenging, it wasn’t clear they knew how to react. That night, for instance, NBC anchor Brian Williams called it “the most important speech of his presidential campaign,” followed by two commentators. MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said the speech “made history.” The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart called it a “very blunt, very honest, very open speech.” But neither was sure it would repair the political damage done by Wright’s divisive words.
Other pundits tried to parse the speech on several levels—responding to the quality of the words and thoughts while also trying to gauge their political impact. Yet even the most nuanced weren’t sure how it would eventually play out. On the March 19 edition of ABC’s Good Morning America, George Stephanopoulos called it “sophisticated” and “eloquent,” before venturing that it “reassured” Obama’s liberal base and may have “helped” with super delegates, but would likely prove a “harder sell” with white working-class voters. The next day, the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz collected the media post-mortems across the ideological scale, concluding that “the reaction on the left and right sometimes made me wonder whether these pundits were watching the same speech. The only point of agreement I found is skepticism that it will help Obama with white, working-class voters, sometimes short-handed as Reagan Democrats.” On March 21, the Boston Globe surveyed citizens in the upcoming primary states of Pennsylvania and Indiana and found mixed views. “He showed his character,” said one Indiana woman of Obama. “America needs to take its blinders off. The country is still prejudiced.” Meanwhile a Philadelphia bartender turned the TV off for Obama’s speech, dismayed that the candidate hadn’t broken more decisively from Wright. “If he said at the beginning, “I disagree, I’ll leave the congregation’…it would be over with and go away,” the man said. As the week ended, there was one more turn in the story line when New Mexico Governor and former Democratic presidential hopeful Bill Richardson—despite a close relationship with Bill and Hillary Clinton—endorsed Obama on March 21. A March 21 Associated Press story posted on Yahoo News! suggested how timely Richardson’s decision was for the Obama camp, coming as he “leads among delegates selected at primaries and caucuses but with national public opinion polling showing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton pulling ahead of him amid controversy over statements by his former pastor.” In fact, daily national Gallup Polls showed Clinton moving out to a seven-point lead over Obama among Democrats earlier last week, with Obama then regaining a three-point lead over Clinton by the weekend. That led some pundits to conclude (or maybe simply guess) that the Wright affair had hurt Obama and the speech—and perhaps the Richardson endorsement—had repaired some of that damage. Others thought it would be some time before the full and real impact of the Wright affair, and the subsequent “speech,” would make itself known.
And now, in the rest of the week’s news:
Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ
Media Exposure by Candidate
Top Overall Stories of the Week
Click here to see the top ten stories for each media sector. Click here to see the methodology for the Campaign Coverage Index
Maybe the good news for Hillary Clinton and Barack But when the media was covering the race for president, the story for Democrats was ugly. It was dominated by the candidates disavowing inflammatory remarks from supporters, by lingering resentments in both camps, and by festering divisions along racial and gender lines. For the first time since the primaries began in January, some other story besides the election seriously competed for the media’s attention last week. From March 10-16, the campaign filled 27% of the newshole, as measured in PEJ’s News Coverage Index, the lowest level so far this year (well below the previous 2008 low of 38%). The disclosure that New York Governor Spitzer patronized prostitutes and his March 12 resignation was a close second, filling 23% of the newshole. Online and on the front pages of newspapers, the sordid demise of Spitzer, known by his prostitution ring nickname as “Client 9,” got more attention than the campaign. In a week of reduced campaign coverage, presumptive Republican nominee John McCain continued his disappearing act, registering as a significant or dominant factor in only 15% of the campaign stories—down from 26% the week before. Overall, stories about Democrats outnumbered those about the Republicans by almost 10 to one.
Interestingly, Obama had a substantial edge in the competition for exposure over Clinton. He was a significant or dominant factor in 67% of the stories studied last week, compared with 51% for Clinton. Obama won last week’s two contests—the March 8 Wyoming caucus and the March 11 Mississippi primary—by big margins. But those victories were largely obscured by a story line focused on fears that a nasty Democratic primary fight was beginning to rip the party asunder The catalyst last week was racially inflammatory remarks by Clinton supporter Geraldine Ferraro and by Obama pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Clinton apologized for Ferraro’s statement that Obama’s race and gender were responsible for his success and Obama rejected Wright remarks that, among other things, assailed the U.S. for widespread racism. But the damage was done. For the week, Ferraro and Wright combined were lead newsmakers (someone who appears in at least 50% of a story) in 18% of the campaign stories—meaning together they generated more coverage than McCain.
The Campaign Coverage index, which will appear weekly until nominees are selected in each party, is an addition to PEJ’s News Coverage Index report, which tracks what stories the media covered in the previous week. The CCI offers a greater level of detail of the campaign coverage. That includes the percentage of stories in which a candidate played a significant role (as a subject of between 25% and 50% of the story) or a main newsmaker role (making up at least 50% of the story). The Index also identifies the key narratives in the reporting and the “Line of the Week,” a statement from a journalist or source that in our researchers’ estimation seems either to capture the story or is particularly colorful. PEJ’s News Coverage Index will not disappear. It will come at the bottom of the CCI. Even coverage of election results were racially tinged last week. A Chicago Tribune analysis of Obama’s Mississippi victory, posted on Google News, noted that exit polls in that state revealed a “race-based resistance” to Obama, with “white Democrats there rejecting his candidacy 70 percent to 26 percent, while 9 of 10 blacks voted for him. It's a dramatic reflection of a recurrent pattern most pronounced in the South,” The Tribune reported. Noting concerns that black voters were offended by Clinton’s suggestion that Obama be her vice president, the March 13 Los Angeles Times reported on warnings that African-Americans could stay at home in November if Clinton won the nomination. Against that backdrop came the Ferraro and Wright flare ups, which simmered for days. By mid-week, Clinton had repudiated Ferraro’s remarks in front of a group of black newspaper publishers and had her surrogates spreading the message as well. During an Oct. 13 appearance on MSNBC, Congressman Gregory Meeks, an African-American Clinton supporter, told Tucker Carlson that “clearly the statements that Geraldine Ferraro made [are] a distraction and should not have been made. They’re inaccurate.”
After a week in which the candidates found themselves on the defensive and racial wounds seemed to trump all else, a New York Times March 16 story summed up the jitters of a party that once saw itself as a heavy favorite in November. And now, in the rest of the week’s news: The stunning Spitzer scandal—with its mix of hubris, sex, and humiliation—was the No. 1 or No. 2 story in all five media sectors, getting its highest level of coverage last week on cable (34%). The staggering U.S. economy was next at 8%, followed by events inside Iraq (4%). An AP investigation that found many water supplies contaminated with small amounts of pharmaceuticals came next at 3%.
Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ
Media Exposure by Candidate
Top Overall Stories of the Week
Click here to see the top ten stories for each media sector. Click here to see the methodology for the Campaign Coverage Index
Back on Oct. 30, 2007, in a story about that
 night’s Democratic debate, NBC anchor Brian Williams raised what he saw as a crucial issue in that primary battle. Barack Obama had vowed “to be tougher in the campaign against frontrunner Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton?” Could he make good?
Fast forward to last week, March 6, 2008—two days after Clinton’s sharp attacks on Obama helped produce campaign-saving wins in Texas and Ohio. Pundit David Gergen broached the same point about Obama, suggesting the answer was still out, on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show. Said Gergen: “He’s got to be a lot tougher and more aggressive…” Clinton turned back the clock on the media narrative for the Democrats last week. For several weeks running, the press had cast Obama as a clear frontrunner, one perhaps on the verge of finishing off his rival. Almost instantly after Texas and Ohio, that narrative returned to where it was through the decidedly mixed Feb. 5 Super Tuesday results—speculating about a hopelessly deadlocked contest decided by superdelegates. And embedded in that in the media coverage last week was a months-old question: Was Obama “tough” enough to win a nomination fight with a determined foe. In many ways, even in a strong week for Clinton, the narrative turned on questions about Obama. As a significant or dominant newsmaker in 60% of campaign stories, Clinton narrowly won the competition for media exposure from March 3-9, a period that began a day before the Texas, Ohio, Vermont and Rhode Island primaries and ended a day after the Wyoming caucus. For Clinton—credited with engineering another comeback in this roller coaster race by aggressively attacking Obama—that was her highest level of 2008 coverage. At 58%, Obama dropped 11 points from the previous week. And in a difficult stretch of coverage, he found himself facing questions about the need to make strategic and tactical changes in his campaign. In the week that the GOP race was formally decided, the Democrats dominated coverage over the Republicans by the lopsided margin of about four-to-one (70% to 18%), a margin similar to the week before. On the Republican side, presumptive nominee John McCain, may be settling into a temporary coverage trough as journalists focus on the Democrats. Last week, McCain—who officially went over the top in delegates—was a significant or dominant factor in 26% of the stories, which closely compares to 28% the week before. With his nomination assured and the Democrats still locked in mortal combat, McCain may have been, as MSNBC’s Chris Matthews called him, “the biggest winner” on March 4. (President Bush, who welcomed McCain to the White House last week, showed up in 4% of the campaign coverage.)
Speaking of not making news, in what was arguably his wife’s most important campaign week, Bill Clinton (at a mere 1%) continued to be conspicuously MIA in the media. The Campaign Coverage index, which will appear weekly until nominees are selected in each party, is an addition to PEJ’s NCI report, which tracks what stories the media covered in the previous week. The CCI offers a greater level of detail of the campaign coverage. That includes the percentage of stories in which a candidate played a significant role (as a subject of between 25% and 50% of the story) or a main newsmaker role (making up at least 50% of the story). The Index also identifies the key narratives in the reporting and the “Line of the Week,” a statement from a journalist or source that in our researchers’ estimation seems either to capture the story or is particularly colorful. PEJ’s News Coverage Index will not disappear. It will come at the bottom of the CCI. The campaign had one of its more dominant weeks in the press in 2008. Despite a crowded news menu that included renewed Mideast violence, a new Russian president, and a torrent of bad economic news, it filled 52% of the newshole for March 3-9, according to the PEJ’s News Coverage Index, an increase of nearly 40% from the previous week’s total. In cable, a whopping 77% of the airtime studied last week was devoted to the race for the White House.
The verdict on her victories in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island was swift, given how close to political death she was considered only a week earlier. “Going negative proved positive in comeback,” The Los Angeles Times headline read the next day. Clinton’s “new voice was angrier, sharper and far more negative toward Obama,” declared the story, which also cited her controversial “3 a.m.” ad questioning Obama’s crisis credentials. A March 6 report on the Fox News Channel also emphasized the experience theme. Clinton held a “cabinet-style meeting” with military brass, the story noted, and stressed her view “that she is best prepared to be the next commander-in-chief.” Pundits seemed to be split over which candidate now had the edge going forward. “What matters now more?” asked Chris Matthews on MSNBC March 5. “Hillary’s Tuesday night momentum or Obama’s…delegate edge?” One point was beyond debate, Matthews declared: Clinton’s big wins “have guaranteed that the Democratic race will go on and on and on and on and on and on.” In the run up to the March 4 contests, the media story line already had Obama on the defensive. “Barack Obama under a barrage of questions and political attacks” declared CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on March 3.
After the results were in, as a March 5 NBC Nightly News report noted, Obama pointed a finger of blame at the media, telling reporters on his plane that Clinton’s “complaining about the refs apparently worked a little bit this week.” But while Obama was criticizing the media, David Gergen was reprising an old, nagging doubt about the candidate and the t-word—toughness. “I don't think [Obama’s] been particularly strong in the two days since Tuesday night.” Gergen said on CNN on March 6. “But he's going to have to get up off the mat and show the same kind of fight that she did when she went down…. I think he's got it in him, but he's got to be a lot tougher and more aggressive than he was today, not only against her, but tougher and more aggressive with himself to show what he has to say about the future.”Some of that aggression seemed to backfire when Obama’s foreign policy advisor Samantha Power resigned on March 7 after calling Clinton a “monster” in a newspaper interview. To cap off a rough week in the media, Obama’s March 8 caucus victory in Wyoming generated minimal bounce. The lead paragraph of the March 9 Washington Post front-page campaign story reported that Clinton’s March 4 wins “appears to have convinced a sizable number of uncommitted Democratic superdelegates to wait until the end of the primaries and caucuses before picking a candidate,” a development that would stanch the recent flow of delegates to Obama. Conversely, Obama’s 23-point win in Wyoming was relegated to the fourth paragraph of the story. And now, in the rest of the week’s news: Last week’s campaign coverage overshadowed a number of stories with potentially far-reaching implications. The second-biggest story, according to the News Coverage Index for March 3-9, was the U.S. economy. But it registered at only 7% in a week when home foreclosures broke new records, and when it was announced that the country suffered 63,000 lost jobs in February. Next came Israeli-Palestinian tensions (4%), at a time when Gaza fighting left more than 100 Palestinians dead and an attack on a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem claimed eight lives. The small blast at a Manhattan military recruiting station was next at 2%, followed by the ascension of Dmitri Medvedev—Vladimir Putin’s handpicked successor as Russian President—also at 2%. Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ
Media Exposure by Candidate
Top Overall Stories of the Week
Click here to see the top ten stories for each media sector. Click here to see the methodology for the Campaign Coverage Index
If Hillary Clinton last week wanted to work
 the refs—or argue with the press to generate more skeptical coverage of Barack Obama and maybe change the subject from her own problems—the evidence suggests it worked.
One of the more memorable moments last week occurred during the Feb. 26 debate, when Clinton—referencing a Saturday Night Live sketch—suggested the media had gone soft on Obama. (“If anybody saw ‘Saturday Night Live,’” the New York Senator noted, “maybe we should ask Barack if he's comfortable and needs another pillow.”) With no primary contests to consume press attention, Clinton’s charges of a pro-Obama tilt reverberated in the media echo chamber last week. Obama’s life and record came under a heightened degree of scrutiny, with everything from his legislative career to his ties to Louis Farrakhan to his African attire getting a public airing. Obama was the top campaign newsmaker and a significant or dominant factor in 69% of the stories from Feb. 25-March 2, a period between the Feb 19 Wisconsin primary and the March 4 tests in Texas and Ohio. That was the highest level of coverage for any candidate in 2008. And part of it was news outlets—from Good Morning America to The New York Times—engaged in introspective inquiry aimed at answering this headline atop one Feb. 29 newspaper story: “Are the media giving Obama a free ride?” Clinton finished second in the derby for media exposure last week, registering as a significant or dominant figure in 58% of the campaign stories, a high water mark for her as well. And after weeks of tough coverage, Clinton may been relieved last week to find the media narrative focused more on her attacks on Obama than her 11-contest losing streak since Super Tuesday. Last week’s campaign coverage also reflected what has become a one-party nomination fight. With the GOP battle widely considered over, Democrats generated more than four times the coverage of Republicans (68% to 15%). Presumptive Republican nominee McCain was at 28%, his lowest total in five weeks and a 10-point drop from last week. With McCain’s nomination a virtual certainty, his coverage last week took some strange detours. That included his high-profile repudiation of a conservative talk host who launched a vitriolic assault on Obama and the mini-flap over whether McCain’s birthplace—the Panama Canal Zone—ran afoul of eligibility requirements for a U.S. President.
That means Huckabee generated less media attention last week than a candidate who never entered the race. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s formal announcement that he was not running helped him register at 3%. That was about the same level of coverage (3%) that greeted Ralph Nader’s decision to make his fifth consecutive bid for the White House. And no doubt to the frustration of his devoted followers, one other GOP candidate who has not yet dropped from the race failed to attract the media’s attention. Ron Paul, the Texas Congressman, generated zero coverage as measured by PEJ’s Index last week, marking at least the seventh straight week he has finished with less than 1% of coverage.
The Campaign Coverage index, which will appear weekly until nominees are selected in each party, is an addition to PEJ’s NCI report, which tracks what stories the media covered in the previous week. The CCI offers a greater level of detail of the campaign coverage. That includes the percentage of stories in which a candidate played a significant role (as a subject of between 25% and 50% of the story) or a main newsmaker role (making up at least 50% of the story). The Index also identifies the key narratives in the reporting and the “Line of the Week,” a statement from a journalist or source that in our researchers’ estimation seems either to capture the story or is particularly colorful. PEJ’s News Coverage Index will not disappear. It will come at the bottom of the CCI. In the good coverage and the bad for Clinton last week, the portrayal was consistent—a fiery candidate in full combat mode. A Feb. 25 report by CNN’s Candy Crowley on the increasingly tough tactics included video of a Clinton speech suggesting that Obama might not be better prepared for the presidency than the current White House occupant. “The unkindest cut of all, a comparison to George Bush” observed Crowley. The next day, on ABC’s Good Morning America, correspondent Jake Tapper explored the controversy over the photo that surfaced of Obama wearing traditional African garb, with the Obama campaign blaming the Clinton campaign and the Clinton team denying any knowledge of the photo. “The stakes are very high and the fight is getting nasty,” was Tapper’s evaluation. The next morning featured a debate post-mortem on CBS’s “Early Show,” with Bob Schieffer critiquing Clinton’s performance, which included her complaint that she always gets the first question, “The one who showed up [to debate Obama] was the Hillary Clinton who was mad as the dickens,” Schieffer said. “She had steam coming out of her ears.” Toward the week’s end, the big newsmaker was Clinton’s dramatic and edgy “3 a.m.” TV ad, which argued that she, rather than Obama, was the candidate prepared to receive a middle-of-the-night phone call about a global crisis. (The spot included images of young children sleeping soundly in their beds as the hot spot flared up.) ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, remarking on the ad’s attempt to deliver a gut-grabbing visceral message to voters, opined that “this is really the last argument for Senator Clinton.”
The Feb. 25 edition of ABC’s World News Tonight featured Terry Moran’s analysis of Obama’s record in the Illinois State Senate, which included some substantive achievements and the 129 “present” votes on various bills. “Former colleagues say the picture is mixed,” said Moran. Three nights later, Dean Reynolds’ CBS report went much deeper, looking at everything from Obama’s Illinois career and performance in the U.S. Senate to his relationship with Louis Farrakhan (whose support Obama has rejected) and continuing whispers that he is a Muslim. “Questions persist about Barack Obama’s identity, who he really is,” declared Reynolds. When the media weren’t vetting Obama’s record, they were questioning their own treatment of him. That was the topic on the Feb. 28 edition of ABC’s Good Morning America, when Diane Sawyer asked: “Have all of us in the media used boxing gloves on Clinton and kid gloves on Obama? Have we been unfair?” Two days later, a New York Times story on the same subject stated that “questions over whether reporters were giving each candidate an equally fair shake were thrust into the center of the campaign itself. There were already indications that Mrs. Clinton and her surrogates were finding traction in casting the news media as a conflicted umpire, while prompting some soul-searching among the reporters themselves.” Sooner or later in any mega-story, the performance of the media emerges as a major angle. With a breather in the primary schedule, that’s clearly what happened last week. The problem is that it’s much easier to pose a question about media bias than to answer it convincingly and credibly. And now, in the rest of the week’s news: Next to the campaign, the U.S. economy—staggering under more negative indicators, and stock market plunges—was the second-biggest story last week, filling 7% of the newshole as measured by the News Coverage Index for Feb. 25-March 2. That was followed by the conflict in Afghanistan (3%), where the news that England’s Prince Harry had been stationed there was the driving factor. Next came events inside Iraq (3%) and the Academy Award ceremonies, also at 3%. Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ
Media Exposure by Candidate
Top Overall Stories of the Week
Click here to see the top ten stories for each media sector. Click here to see the methodology for the Campaign Coverage Index
Note: Due to technical recording errors, this week's sample does not include the following radio programs from Thursday, February 28, and Friday, February 29: Rush Limbaugh, ABC News Radio Headlines, and CBS News Radio Headlines. Also, the sample does not include Sean Hannity's radio program from Thursday, February 28.
If the week of Feb. 18-24 began with Beneath the grim headline “Somber Clinton Soldiers On as the Horizon Darkens” was a story that offered this passel of pessimism on Sunday, Feb. 24: “Morale is low. After 13 months of dawn-to-dark seven-day weeks, the staff is exhausted. Some have taken to going home early — 9 p.m. — turning off their BlackBerrys, and polishing off bottles of wine, several senior staff members said.” With their grueling primary battle possibly heading toward the endgame, Democrats dominated campaign coverage by about 2-1 in the period last week, which stretched from the day before the Wisconsin primary to three days after the big Texas debate. Obama, who ran his post-Super Tuesday winning streak to 11 primary contests, won the race for media attention last week. By appearing as a significant or dominant factor in 57% of all campaign stories, he attracted his highest level of coverage since the Campaign Coverage Index was launched in January. And although she trailed him, by registering in 50% of last week’s coverage, Clinton generated her second-highest total. But it was Obama’s impressive 17-point win in the Feb. 19 Wisconsin primary that was expected to be competitive that determined the Democrats’ media narrative last week. That narrative primarily wondered whether Clinton had anything left in her arsenal to impede Obama’s path to the nomination. When the commentariat generally judged their Feb. 21 debate as a draw, that was widely viewed as a tactical win for Obama. The conventional wisdom now held that Clinton had to do something dramatic to shake up the race. Even though the Republican contest was effectively resolved on Super Tuesday, John McCain was a significant or dominant factor in 38% of last week’s campaign news. It’s an impressive total that he owes largely to one story—the controversial Feb. 21 New York Times story bearing the headline, “For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk.” The story alleged that during the 2000 presidential campaign, McCain’s advisors became concerned about an inappropriate relationship between the Senator and a female lobbyist. So they “intervened to protect the candidate from himself” by working to keep McCain and the woman apart. The story also raised the prospect of a romantic relationship between the married candidate and the much younger lobbyist.
Not only did the Times story become a major part of the campaign narrative last week, it supercharged what had been a fairly slow news week for McCain. From Feb. 21 through Feb. 24, the GOP’s presumptive nominee became the week’s leading newsmaker, showing up as a significant or dominant factor in 51% of the stories compared to 43% for Clinton and 41% for Obama in that period.
The Campaign Coverage index, which will appear weekly until nominees are selected in each party, is an addition to PEJ’s NCI report, which tracks what stories the media covered in the previous week. The CCI offers a greater level of detail of the campaign coverage. That includes the percentage of stories in which a candidate played a significant role (as a subject of between 25% and 50% of the story) or a main newsmaker role (making up at least 50% of the story). The Index also identifies the key narratives in the reporting and the “Line of the Week,” a statement from a journalist or source that in our researchers’ estimation seems either to capture the story or is particularly colorful. PEJ’s News Coverage Index will not disappear. It will come at the bottom of the CCI. Once again, the campaign overwhelmed the news agenda last week. Coverage of the presidential race filled 44% of the newshole, as measured by PEJ’s News Coverage Index. As part of a clearly emerging trend, the battle for the White House once again generated the most attention on cable news (69%) and radio (53%), the two media sectors that are home to the daily talk shows. And since primary voters began trekking to the polls in January, the campaign’s dominance of the news agenda has been overwhelming. In the six weeks since the CCI debuted, the race has accounted for 45% of all news coverage, distantly followed by the troubled U.S. economy at 8%. To find the third-biggest story in that period, events inside Iraq, you have to drop all the way down to 2% of the newshole. On the Democratic side, the media narrative for the week began with a Clinton offensive on the eve of the Wisconsin vote. Noting that “Wisconsin is now Hillary Clinton’s next best hope to stop Barack Obama’s momentum,” CBS correspondent Jim Axelrod delivered a Feb. 19 Early Show account of Clinton’s charges that Obama was ducking debates and had plagiarized passages of a speech from Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. But when Wisconsin voters delivered for Obama that day, the tone of coverage changed. The next day’s Boston Globe story on the Wisconsin results had Obama “building an imposing delegate lead and extending a broad reach across Democratic constituencies….such as women, lower-income families and union households—that had been strongholds for Clinton.” That evening, the Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly digested the results and asked the question: “Is Barack Obama unstoppable?” (His answer was an almost certain “yes.”)
One wrinkle that emerged from that debate and fed the Obama surge narrative was Clinton’s gracious closing remarks--“I am honored to be here with Barack Obama…Whatever happens, we’re gonna be fine,”-- that spurred a big ovation from the debate audience. But in the media post-mortems, many wondered whether that was a rehearsal for a concession speech. “She seemed almost to surrender to the will of the voters,” observed ABC’s David Wright as Good Morning America replayed those comments the next morning. John McCain may have thought so, perhaps. Apparently concluding that Obama was the likely nominee, McCain began training his attacks on the Illinois Senator early in the week. At least until a new foe suddenly arose—the New York Times. That Feb. 21 story, and reaction to it, quickly overwhelmed the GOP narrative. And as that night’s ABC newscast suggested, the Times journalism became as much a part of the story as McCain. The article “raised as many questions about the paper and what standards of proof it would need to publish such a story as it did about the Senator,” declared anchor Charles Gibson. The Feb. 22 Los Angeles Times reported that the story “set off a furor among readers and journalists” and may well have worked to McCain’s advantage by “unify[ing] conservative commentators around the presumptive Republican presidential nominee…Conservative commentators, including some who had previously chastised McCain for not hewing closely to their principles, leaped to the candidate’s defense.” The Times story, by raising the issue of McCain’s relationship with the lobbyists, was not without potential peril for a candidate was has positioned himself as a staunch foe of Washington’s entrenched powers. And by the next day, CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric was asking how his reliance on lobbyists in this campaign “square[s] with McCain’s opposition to special interests.” Still, the initial sense at least was that the Times story—probably the most controversial piece of campaign journalism to date in this race—seemed to be creating more problems for the paper than for McCain. There was at week’s end, rumblings of enough scrutiny of McCain’s history with lobbying, however, to suggest the larger issue may not be entirely settled. And now, in the rest of the week’s news: After the campaign, the three-biggest stories last week involved major global events with potentially significant implications for the U.S. Kosovo’s declaration of independence, which led to rioting and pitted the U.S. versus Russia, was the No. 2 story at 7%. The changing of the guard in Cuba, or at least the transition from Fidel Castro to Raul Castro, was next at 6 % while the Pakistani elections that handed a resounding defeat to President Pervez Musharraf’s party came in at 4%. The troubled U.S. economy rounded out the top five, also at 4% Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ
Media Exposure by Candidate
Top Overall Stories of the Week
Click here to see the top ten stories for each media sector. Click here to see the methodology for the Campaign Coverage Index. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Home | Numbers | Analysis | News Index | Daily Briefing | State of the News Media | Journalism Resources | About PEJ | Contact Us
 Powered by: Phase2 Technology
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Meanwhile, the story lines for McCain’s Democratic rivals illustrated the pitfalls facing two candidates still slugging it out. Clinton had to deal with two negative narratives that consumed much of the week. There was the demotion of chief campaign strategist Mark Penn, after it was revealed he was helping Colombia with a trade agreement that Clinton opposes. And Bill Clinton reignited a dying furor over his wife’s faulty recollection that she had dodged sniper fire during a 1996 trip to Bosnia.
For both candidates, the coverage included some scandal hangover. The media fallout over Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright’s incendiary sermons—which accounted for 37% of campaign coverage the week of March 17-23—still got some coverage but was down to 5% last week. And while Clinton’s mistaken recollection about dodging sniper fire during a 1996 trip to Bosnia accounted for 14% of the coverage two weeks ago, the flap faded to 2%.
On the others side of the aisle, John McCain, who picked up the endorsement of Nancy Reagan last week, saw his coverage move up to 24% from 17% the previous week. But that still amounted to less than half of Obama’s or Clinton’s coverage, something some observers see as a boon to the presumptive GOP nominee.
declared conservative MSNBC commentator Pat Buchanan, after Obama’s March 18 speech on race designed to quell the furor over the inflammatory rhetoric of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Sitting next to Buchanan, African-American radio host Joe Madison concurred, calling it “an outstanding speech.”
To what extent did Obama get in front of the Wright controversy? To some degree, Obama was able to move Wright off center stage by injecting himself into the matter. For instance, Wright was a lead newsmaker in 7% of the campaign stories last week, far fewer than Obama. 
As for Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who arguably did far better in this race than many journalists had predicted, his last week in the campaign did not generate much attention. He was a significant or dominant factor in just 4% of the coverage, up from 2% the week before. (And Ron Paul, whose followers made his lack of coverage a major campaign issue, managed to generate only 1%, as he also announced the “winding down” of his campaign last week.)
Mike Huckabee, who was written off by the media in the early stages of the campaign and again before his surprising Super Tuesday wins, appears to have been counted out for the third, and probably final, time by the press, registering at about 2%.
McCain’s counterattack against what he called a “smear campaign,” first launched the night before the story hit print, was soon followed by criticism of the Times in the media world itself, creating a separate and unintended story line. By the end of the week, the political press was wondering whether the Times had accomplished something McCain had been previously unable to do—rally disgruntled conservatives to his side.
