News Index
After weeks of focusing on the prospect of a deadlocked
 race with no end in sight, the media narrative for the Democratic presidential race shifted dramatically last week, anointing a definite frontrunner and an underdog.
In a week in which the Democratic candidates thoroughly dominated campaign coverage, Hillary Clinton barely edged Barack Obama in the competition for exposure. But in the period of Feb. 11-17—which included three resounding Clinton losses in Virginia, Maryland and Washington D.C.—the media raised serious questions about her campaign’s capabilities and her viability. (In some corners of the punditocracy unfriendly to Clinton, her political obit was being prepared.) Conversely, Obama—who ran his post-Super Tuesday winning streak to eight states with the Feb. 12 “Potomac Primary” and established a delegate lead—rode a wave of positive coverage, depicting him with a real, if not decisive advantage. Obama was a significant or dominant factor in 55.5% of the week’s campaign coverage compared to 57% for Clinton—the highest level of coverage for both since the Campaign Coverage Index began five weeks ago. But when it came to the tone of that coverage, he was a big winner. Here’s one symbolic illustration of those divergent narratives. The front-page Feb. 11 USA Today story began with the news that Clinton team, after a series of primary and caucus defeats, had replaced campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle. The next day, ABC’s Good Morning America reported that the famed wax museum, Madame Tussauds, had just unveiled a statue of Obama standing in the Oval Office of the White House. (A Clinton statue had been created a year ago. But in politics, timing and momentum are everything.) While there’s been little drama on the GOP side since Super Tuesday, John McCain, the presumptive nominee, registered at 34% of the coverage last week. An endorsement from Mitt Romney and wins in Washington D.C., Maryland and Virginia, did not put a stop to stories questioning McCain’s appeal to conservatives. But he is now so far ahead in the race for delegates that remaining challenger Mike Huckabee faced growing questions about his motives for continuing. At 18%, Huckabee had a substantial week of coverage. But after being lauded as the surprise winner of the Feb. 5 Super Tuesday contests, he was depicted last week someone on an increasingly quixotic quest.
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. Even in a crowded news week, the 2008 campaign dominated the news agenda, filling 40% of the newshole from Feb. 11-17, as measured by PEJ’s News Coverage Index. Once again, cable television (at 62%) devoted the most attention to the story, with radio next at 46%. At the outset of last week, the media focus was on a troubled Clinton candidacy. “It was a clean sweep this weekend for Barack Obama,” said correspondent Andrea Mitchell on NBC’s Today show, referring to Obama wins in Nebraska, Louisiana, Washington and Maine. “This while Hillary Clinton changes her campaign manager and hopes to stop Obama’s momentum in big primaries to come in March.” After Obama’s impressive showing on Feb. 12, the story was not simply that he won, but that he did so by making serious inroads into Clinton’s base. “Memo to Hillary Rodham Clinton: Barack Obama is stealing your faithful,” was the opening paragraph in an AP story posted Feb. 13 on MSNBC.com that credited Obama with doing better among whites, women and the elderly—voters “who form the core of Clinton's political base.”The news didn’t improve for Clinton who also had to deal with speculation about the loss of some of her Superdelegates. In a Feb. 15 report on CBS’s newscast, Katie Couric noted that “a chill went through Hillary Clinton’s campaign today,” with news that Georgia Congressman John Lewis might be switching his support from Clinton to Obama. While explaining that Lewis’s intentions weren’t clear, correspondent Dean Reynolds said that the possible erosion of Superdelegates is “at the very least…a worrisome development for Senator Clinton at a time when she’s trying to fight back from a series of damaging defeats.”
On Feb. 14, CBS’ Early Show aired a piece examining the power of Obama’s appeal with voters. “With soaring rhetoric, Obama is moving his audiences not just politically, but emotionally,” declared correspondent Tracy Smith. “The stoic eloquence channels John F. Kennedy.” It was the kind of story that has some Clinton supporters complaining about a pro-Obama press bias. For McCain, his battle to win over reluctant conservatives continues to be a main thread in a media narrative that has him as the nominee-in-waiting. On the Feb. 12 edition of CNN’s Situation Room, correspondent Dana Bash reported that in a meeting with other GOP Senators, McCain offered the message “that he hopes his colleagues on the Republican side are behind him. He hopes to unite the party behind him. But he knows he has a lot of work to do.’” But even as McCain faces that nagging issue, he benefited from the increasing perception in the media that the Huckabee campaign is now only a symbolic effort. In a discussion on CBS’ “Early Show,” host Harry Smith asked his guest about what he called “this lingering Huckabee thing.” Whatever Smith’s intent, when a presidential campaign is described as a “lingering…thing,” it’s a sure sign the media see it on life support. And now, in the rest of the week’s news: Next to the campaign, the biggest-story last week was domestic terrorism, (at 6% of the newshole), a subject driven largely by the dispute between the Congress and White House over a new surveillance bill. That was followed by continuing problems with the U.S. economy (6%), and the Northern Illinois University shooting rampage (5%) that left six dead, including the killer. Rounding out the top-five list last week was that rare sports story that makes the front pages. Roger Clemens’ defiant, dramatic and some might say dubious testimony before Congress helped baseball’s steroid scandal fill 5% of the newshole last week. 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.
On Super Tuesday week, with voters from
 about half the states weighing in, coverage of the 2008 presidential race reached its highest level to date. And when the winnowing was done, just three candidates—out of a field that once included 20—stood out in the glare of the media spotlight.
But the journalistic narratives were not really the ones for which any of those three—Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John McCain—was probably hoping. Instead, a tone of additional challenge rather than triumph, and of continuing suspense, characterized the coverage last week, a period that began the day before Super Tuesday and stretched through a smaller series of weekend contests. On the Democratic side, Clinton was a significant or dominant factor in 41% of the campaign stories from Feb. 4-10, just ahead of Obama, at 40%. By week’s end, however, the media were depicting her as a beleaguered ex-frontrunner trying to counter Obama’s momentum. For his part, Obama fell short of some last-minute media expectations by failing to win such key states as Massachusetts or California and could not lay claim to the frontrunner mantle that some possibly erroneous media polls and excited commentary seemed to hint at. Instead, the week ended with the press contemplating a scenario that many Democrats dread—a deadlock decided by Superdelegates.
That should have been cause for celebration in his camp. But as the week drew to a close, much of the media narrative concerned his continuing problems with what at times was described as a hostile conservative wing of the GOP. And in some ways, the surprise in the media was McCain’s inability to vanquish all challengers.
For those GOP rivals, there was one funeral and one resurrection last week. Mitt Romney, at 28%, earned his highest level of coverage in five weeks, but much of that was an obit for a bid that ended after a disappointing Super Tuesday. Mike Huckabee again flummoxed the media mavens after he won in seven states last week. Coverage of Huckabee in turn increased nearly ten-fold from the week before, from 2% to 19%. But while his campaign was re-ignited, Huckabee still generated only about half the coverage of McCain. The press continued to treat him as a quixotic long shot, albeit a dogged one. At least he got back in the headlines. Ron Paul, the libertarian Republican still standing in this race, remained off the media radar screen, generating less than 1% of coverage. And just two weeks after injecting himself into the thick of the campaign and attracting more coverage than any Republican, Bill Clinton continued his disappearing act. Last week, he was a significant or dominant subject in only 2% of the campaign stories. All told, the Republicans overall edged out the Democrats in the coverage derby last week, with 41% of the stories being mostly about the GOP candidates compared with 38% about Democrats. 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. Thanks to the Super Tuesday voting in 24 states and a handful of contests over the weekend, the campaign generated its highest level of weekly coverage, filling 55% of the newshole, as measured by PEJ’s News Coverage Index for Feb. 4-10. The race for the White House filled up a remarkable 74% of the airtime on cable last week and almost as much, 65% of the newshole, on radio.
A Feb. 4 CNN.com post headlined “National Super Tuesday poll shows dramatic Democratic shift,” reported that Obama had erased Clinton’s once-formidable lead. Clinton’s “once commanding lead across the country has evaporated,” echoed MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson on Feb. 4. “Momentum clearly is with Barack Obama.” That kind of coverage built expectations for Obama. But the Super Tuesday split decision—with Clinton holding him at bay in California and Massachusetts and New Jersey—initially generated headlines suggesting she had won by not losing. “Last night brought a sense of relief to the Clinton campaign,” reported the Washington Post on Feb. 6. On ABC’s Good Morning America, George Stephanopoulos recalled his prediction that Obama would move into the lead over Clinton if he could take two out of three key states—Massachusetts, Missouri, and California. “It did not happen,” he said flatly. This may have been a clear case of expectations rather than results coloring the analysis. Only a week earlier, a Democratic split on Super Tuesday might have been considered an Obama triumph. The story line shifted again a day after the voting with the news that Clinton had lent her campaign $5 million. That seemed largely served to highlight Obama’s fundraising prowess. Obama followed up with weekend wins in Nebraska, Louisiana, Washington and Maine. But by the end of the week, the media were less interested in trying to figure out which Democrat had inched into a momentary advantage and more interested in the implications of enduring deadlock. On Feb. 10, the New York Times and Washington Post published page-one stories looking at the possibility that it would be party bigwigs, rather than voters, who would be the deciders. “The Superdelegates: 796 Insiders May Hold Democrats’ Key” declared the Post headline. “Neck and Neck, Democrats Woo Superdelegates,” added the Times. For McCain, the Super Tuesday results, with his crucial California win, did winnow the field by forcing the withdrawal of Romney, viewed by the media as his most formidable challenger. “Senator John McCain seized command of the race for the Republican presidential nomination,” declared the Associated Press story summing up the Feb. 5 voting. Expectations again may have been a factor here. Many press accounts anticipated that that Romney’s last stand would end the race. But when Huckabee proved a stubborn survivor, the media narrative quickly moved, perhaps justifiably, from McCain’s path to the nomination to his trouble with the party’s more conservative adherents. There was less inclination to focus on the remarkable unlikelihood of his triumph from the political ashes a few months earlier. On Feb. 7, the Wall Street Journal’s front-page noted that “rarely has a party’s pick made so many enemies along the way, from church pews to corporate boardrooms.” The next day, CBS’ Early Show reported on, as did much of the media, the decidedly mixed reception McCain received during a Feb. 7 speech to conservative activists. “He did get booed on the issue of immigration,” said correspondent Chip Reid. “They just detest him on certain issues—campaign finance, immigration and a few others.” That anger toward McCain has also in some ways simplified the interpretation of Huckabee’s success. When the former Arkansas governor—no favorite of the Republican right himself—defeated McCain on Feb. 9 in Louisiana and Kansas, the Washington Post declared him “the vehicle for a conservative rebuke of the idea that [McCain] had sewn up the Republican nomination.” Romney ended his campaign on an emotional high note before a friendly crowd at the conservative CPAC convention. Many of the Mitt post-mortems suggested that he might well have another presidential run in him. But Romney’s evolving positions on a number of issues earned him the distrust, if not the enmity, of a number of pundits and commentators. “Here lieth the campaign of Mitt Romney, victim of the mistaken belief that the only way to succeed in national Republican politics was to turn yourself into something you are not,” wrote Newsweek’s Howard Fineman. As for Huckabee, the week started with calls for him to withdraw. It ended with Huckabee dubbed the Super Tuesday “surprise” for his strong showing in the South. On MSNBC on Feb. 8, Huckabee’s campaign manager Chip Saltsman, when asked why his candidate persists against such long odds, reminded everyone of the fallibility of the punditocracy. “Three or four months ago, John McCain and Mike Huckabee were left for dead in this campaign,” said Saltsman. “Nobody thought John McCain and Mike Huckabee [would be] the last two men standing.” Journalists made some amends to Huckabee. After barely registering in coverage for the week of Jan. 28-Feb. 3, he vaulted back into the news mix last week, proving once again that the media ignore him at their peril. But if media exposure is any measure, the press corps still does not see him as a viable contender. And now, in the rest of the week’s news: The devastating string of Super Tuesday tornadoes in the South, which filled 7% of the newshole according to the NCI for Feb. 4-10, supplanted the U.S. economy as the second-biggest story of the week. The troubled economy slumped to third place at 5%. That was followed by coverage of Super Bowl 42, in which the Giants pulled a huge upset victory over the Patriots (3%), and domestic terrorism (2%) a story given legs last week by the CIA’s acknowledgement that the U.S. had used waterboarding on three terror suspects. 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.
The media’s coverage of the campaign
 last week seemed to reflect a growing consensus that the Republican and Democratic nomination fights were moving along two distinctly different trajectories.
With Florida winner John McCain getting about 75% more coverage than Mitt Romney, and with Mike Huckabee almost invisible, the press appeared conspicuously close to turning McCain into the presumptive nominee last week. In that Jan. 28-Feb. 3 period, which ran from the day before the Florida primary to two days before Super Tuesday, McCain generated more coverage than any candidate. And that coverage suggested a media “tiering” of the race, with McCain a heavy favorite over several also-rans. McCain had not necessarily put Mitt Romney away, but the press nearly had. On the Democratic side—where Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were virtually equal in media attention for the third consecutive week—the tone and level of coverage anticipated a long and intense battle. The message here, which began two days after Obama’s victory in South Carolina, was that there would be no verdict soon. And for the second week in a row a non-candidate (this time, Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy) played an important role in the Democratic narrative.
Two candidates called it quits last week, and they also generated quite different coverage. Republican Rudy Giuliani, the early frontrunner whose candidacy expired in Florida, generated twice as much coverage as Democrat John Edwards, who was never able to crack the media’s “two company, three’s a crowd” view of the Democratic contest. But much of Giuliani’s coverage was a schadenfreude-saturated post-mortem attacking his candidacy. These are some of the findings from Project for Excellence in Journalism’s fourth edition of the Campaign Coverage Index, a measure of which candidate is winning in the all-important race for media exposure. The Project will run the Index until nominees are selected in each party. Last week was a big one for McCain. He beat Romney in Florida, and won the endorsements of Giuliani and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the first three weeks of the CCI, the gap between McCain and Romney never exceeded five points. Last week, however, McCain was a significant or dominant newsmaker in 37% of the campaign stories compared with only 21% for Romney. Both totals were up from the previous week, but McCain’s more than doubled—from 17% to 37%. Giuliani, at 14%, matched his coverage from the week before. But Huckabee, who had earned a respectable 14% of coverage as recently as the week of Jan. 19 South Carolina primary, was down to just 2% last week, even though he is still running. The parties’ overall battle for coverage was close, with the Democrats featured in 46% of the stories compared to 42% for the GOP.
For the week, Obama was a significant or dominant newsmaker in 34% of the campaign stories compared to 32% for Clinton. (Both candidates’ coverage dropped from the previous week when Obama nipped Clinton, 41% to 40%.) And Edwards was at 7% in his swan song week. The wild card was Kennedy, who with his niece Caroline, delivered Obama a symbolically significant endorsement on Jan. 28. As a result, Kennedy was a dominant newsmaker (50% or more of the story) in 7% of the campaign stories last week. During the week of the Democrats’ Jan. 26 South Carolina primary, the non-candidate newsmaker was Bill Clinton, whose aggressive campaign role made him a significant or dominant figure in 18% of the stories and generated numerous suggestions that he lower his profile. Last week he did, registering at only 6% on the Coverage Index. 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 also continued to overwhelm all other news in the national press. The story accounted for 51% of all the news measured by PEJ’s News Coverage Index in the week of Jan. 28-Feb. 3. That was the highest level for the campaign since that Index began in January 2007. The race for the White House consumed 49% of the network news airtime, 59% of the radio time, and 76% of the cable newshole. Since the beginning of the year, the campaign has swamped all other news, averaging 46% of the newshole per week. In all of 2007, only one story ever reached that level and that was the Virginia Tech massacre, which accounted for 51% of the coverage for just one week. For McCain, the media narrative began with him locked in a tight race with Romney in Florida. The Jan. 29 New York Times described both candidates “trading attacks [and] aggressively courting voters across the Florida peninsula in a primary battle that could producer a clear front-runner…” The Florida win then cemented the idea of McCain as a frontrunner, if not a steamroller. A Jan. 30 FoxNews.com report on Google News described the Arizona Senator’s “wave of political momentum” in his race. The next morning NBC’s Today show codified that momentum. “John McCain is very quickly consolidating Republican support,” correspondent David Gregory noted. “Mitt Romney’s only play left is to appear as the conservative alternative to John McCain, a job more difficult with Mike Huckabee still in the race…” By the time the weekend polls had hit, the press was portraying McCain on the cusp of victory. A Feb. 3 Washington Post story showed him up by 24 points over Romney in a national poll, a lead, the article concluded, that “gives him the opportunity to effectively wrap up the nomination with a strong showing Tuesday.” In a week, the narrative had taken McCain from the Florida nail biter to the Super Tuesday Promised Land, a considerable journey. As for Giuliani, his departure finally generated a fair amount of attention, just as his expected departure had a week earlier. (He had a lot more trouble generating attention before that). But the narrative was blunt and pretty universal. “He was a terrible candidate,” Mark Shields put it on the Jan. 30 edition of PBS’ NewsHour. “The more he campaigned, the worse he did in every state…He didn’t seem very comfortable with people.” As seems to be the case every week, Clinton and Obama were locked in the same one-on-one story line. The Kennedy endorsements, complete with the fiery rhetoric of the silver-maned Massachusetts Senator, generated plenty of coverage, with ABC’s Kate Snow speculating that “the Kennedy name could help in heavily Hispanic states, like New Mexico and Arizona.” Her ABC colleague David Wright went considerably farther, rhapsodizing that “today, the audacity of hope had its rendezvous with destiny.” But the most eagerly awaited event was the Jan. 31 debate, the first chance for the African-American and female candidate to square off directly. When it was over, the media verdict was summed up by CNN’s Bill Schneider. Writing for CNN.com on Feb. 1, he described it as an encounter that settled little. “In all, it was an unhelpful debate,” Schneider wrote. “They minimized their differences. Last night’s showdown will rally Democrats…but won’t help them make a decision.”Perhaps, but media polls still showed Obama closing the gap. The new Washington Post-ABC survey found Clinton narrowly leading Obama nationally, 47% to 43%. “Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.) are running roughly even nationally as the battle for the Democratic nomination heads into Tuesday's big round of primaries and caucuses,” the Feb. 3 Post story declared. “The Democratic contest is likely to keep going.” And now, in the rest of the week’s news: In other news, for the third week in a row, the troubled U.S. economy was the second-biggest story behind the campaign, as measured by the News Coverage Index for Jan. 28-Feb. 3. But at 7% of the newshole, it was down significantly from 19% the previous week. That was followed by President Bush’s State of the Union address at 6%. (In contrast, last year’s State of the Union was at 13% and tied for top story of the week.) Rounding out the top-five story list was violence in Kenya (2%) and the conflict in Afghanistan (also at 2%). Once again, with the primary season reaching its peak, there is little oxygen for other news.
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.
“I can’t tell who I’m running against sometimes,”
 said Barack Obama last week. It was a reference to the aggressive campaigning before the Jan. 26 South Carolina Democratic primary by both Hillary and Bill Clinton.
Last week’s election coverage suggests he had a point. Although the landslide winner in South Carolina was the leading newsmaker of the week, he was certainly outdone in the race for media exposure by the Clinton tag team. Obama edged Hillary Clinton by the narrowest of margins. But her surrogate and husband—whose aggressive attacks on Obama and increasingly conspicuous role have been manna for political pundits—was the third-most prominent newsmaker in the race for President last week, January 21 through 27. That period began two days after the Nevada caucuses and ended the day after the Democrats’ South Carolina primary. The man who would be First Spouse made more news last week than any Republican, or than the other Democratic contender, John Edwards. Among GOP rivals, Mitt Romney, a co-leader in many Florida polls, dropped precipitously in the race for exposure. So did Mike Huckabee, whose candidacy the media now appear to discount.
And Rudolph Giuliani was back, his coverage more than tripling from the week before, despite plunging in the polls—a sign that media coverage and poll numbers do not necessarily track. Some candidates apparently are a good story whether they are rising or falling. These are some of the findings from Project for Excellence in Journalism’s third edition of the Campaign Coverage Index, a measure of which candidate is winning in the all-important race for media exposure. The project will run the Index until nominees are selected in each party. Obama, who ended the week of Jan. 21-27 with a surprisingly big win in South Carolina, was a significant or dominant newsmaker in 41% of the week’s campaign coverage. That marks his highest coverage level in the three weeks since the Project began its CCI and the first time he has edged Clinton.It is not true, as some might have imagined, that Bill got even more coverage than his wife. But when Hillary Clinton’s 40% and Bill Clinton’s 18% coverage totals were added together, they were dominant or significant subjects in well over half the week’s campaign stories. John Edwards’ coverage increased, but at only 11%, he generated about one-fourth as much attention as the two frontrunners.
Sitting out the first few contests, Giuliani showed up as a significant or dominant figure in only 4% of the stories in each of the two previous weeks. But last week, he was at 14% as the media focus shifted to Florida. Unfortunately for him, much of that coverage was about how his poll numbers had fallen. 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 overshadowed every other news event last week. The presidential campaign filled 39% of the newshole as measured by PEJ’s News Coverage Index from Jan. 21-27, exactly the same percentage it had filled the week before. As was the case the previous week, the two sectors that devoted the most coverage to the campaign were cable news (61%) and radio (45%)—two platforms that also feature highly opinionated talk hosts. In some ways, the similar level of coverage between Obama and Clinton made sense. As the coverage unfolded, Obama and both Clintons were linked in the same narrative of attack and counterattack—much of it centered on the proprietary, accuracy and efficacy of the attacks themselves. Were the Clintons playing the race card? Were their attacks fair? Or was Obama getting the better of the spin? The dynamic left the press wondering about the longer range impact of such a bruising week on both campaigns. Hillary Clinton came into the week savoring a tough win in the Jan. 19 Nevada caucus, but the story quickly became her husband’s expanding role. One example was the Jan. 21 ABC report that highlighted Bill Clinton attacks on Obama about everything from his position on Iraq (a “fairy tale”) to his assertion that the Republicans had been the party of “ideas.” As the week wore on, however, the narrative seemed to suggest that Clinton’s tactics, especially Bill’s, were dangerous and possibly out of bounds. Bill Clinton’s “recent outbursts are raising questions about how far is too far and when might this asset turn into a liability,” stated correspondent Dan Harris who then cited concerns about “whether Hillary Clinton can rein in her husband even if she wanted to.” Even in its endorsement of Hillary Clinton on the eve of South Carolina, the New York Times called for a change in “tone” warning that “Bill Clinton’s overheated comments are feeding…resentments, and could do long-term damage to her candidacy if he continues this way.” A fair amount of coverage also tried to evaluate the Clinton team in tactical terms. Would the strategy work? The Austin American-Statesman foreshadowed Obama’s big margin among South Carolina blacks by noting that the racially tinged campaign had “left black voters in this state confused, angry and feeling somewhat betrayed.” (CNN exit polls found that about 60% of Democratic primary voters considered Bill Clinton’s role an important factor in their vote and of that group, Barack beat Hillary Clinton by 11 points.) A longer view was offered on the Fox News Channel’s Hannity & Colmes by Clinton-advisor-turned-critic Dick Morris. Morris contended the Clintons’ strategy was to turn South Carolina into “the black primary” that would trigger “a racial backlash [that] causes the whites to vote for Hillary and she wins Florida and Super Tuesday.”
Obama threw some shots of his own. Bill Clinton “continues to make statements that are not supported by the facts,” he said on Good Morning America “…This has become a habit.” But a bigger question in the media narrative was whether the South Carolina clashes had eroded Obama’s cross-demographic appeal. After the South Carolina vote, however, that assessment—that the Clinton tactics would doubtless marginalize Obama—seemed premature, and the media’s surprise may have amplified the sense of Obama’s victory. “A Margin That Will Be Hard To Marginalize,” the Jan. 27 Washington Post headline read. “Senator Barack Obama proved in South Carolina on Saturday that he could not only endure everything the Clinton campaign threw at him in the most confrontational week of the presidential contest so far but also draw votes across racial lines even in a Southern state,” the New York Times story that day said. On the Republican side, McCain made news on several fronts, ranging from his New York Times endorsement (which he has not exactly bragged about) to his problems with such pillars of conservative talk radio as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. The media had McCain locked in virtual tie in the pre-Florida election polls with Romney, who saw a significant drop in coverage and some unflattering stories as well. A Jan. 24 New York Times piece pondered Romney’s apparent emergence as the candidate most disliked by his Republican rivals. “With so much attention recently on the sniping between Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama on the Democratic side, the almost visceral scorn directed at Mr. Romney by his rivals has been overshadowed,” the story asserted. If Giuliani had a moment in the media spotlight last week, it turned cloudy fast. A Jan. 25 ABC report that he had slipped back in the Florida polls sounded like a political obituary. “Political observers are trading theories as to what happened to Giuliani’s campaign,” said correspondent Jake Tapper. Two campaigns officially faded into the past tense last week—those of Democrat Dennis Kucinich (3% in coverage) and Republican Fred Thompson (5%). But the winner of the Iowa caucuses, who also nearly won South Carolina, Mike Huckabee last week fared only slightly better in the competition for coverage—at 6%. That seemed to reflect something of a dismissal of Huckabee’s chances by the media. “Huckabee’s second-place finish in South Carolina has left him strapped for cash,” declared a Boston Globe story. “He is not running television ads in Florida, has suspended a press charter plane because not enough reporters are following him to require one, and acknowledged yesterday that he has stopped paying some top staff.” By the metrics the press uses to measure viability, Huckabee is disappearing. And so is the attention paid. And now, in the rest of the week’s news: For the second week in a row, the U.S. economy generated major coverage and was the second-biggest story. In the week of Jan. 21-27—which included an emergency fed rate cut, a 600-point one-day swing on Wall Street, and preliminary agreement on a stimulus package—the economy filled 19% of the overall newshole, including 26% of the airtime studied on network TV news and 23% of the front-page coverage in newspapers.
The third-biggest story of the week (at 4%) was the mysterious death of young Australian actor Heath Ledger in his New York apartment. Rounding out the top-five stories was the build-up to the Super Bowl (2%) and events on the ground in Iraq (2%).
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 a week when Republicans fought two
 hotly contested primary battles and the Democrats only one, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama still attracted more coverage than top GOP newsmakers Mitt Romney and John McCain—and Clinton and Obama were in a virtual dead heat.
But Republicans overall generated more press than Democrats last week, a rare occurrence in this campaign season. What tipped the scales? A big difference, once again, was the treatment of Mike Huckabee versus John Edwards. Despite complaints from the Edwards campaign, the media, who apparently consider Huckabee a more viable contender than Edwards, lavished much more attention on the former Republican Governor of Arkansas than on the ex-Democratic Senator from North Carolina. In his last gasp before dropping out, meanwhile, Fred Thompson barely registered on the media radar, a problem that, to some extent, also faces Rudolph Giuliani as he tries to jump start his candidacy in the vital Jan. 29 Florida contest. These are some of the findings from Project for Excellence in Journalism’s second edition of the Campaign Coverage Index, a measure of which candidate is winning in the all-important race for media exposure. The project will run the Index until nominees are selected in each party.
Still both leading Democrats registered slightly higher than the leading GOP attention getter, Romney, who captured a win in Michigan. He was a significant or primary factor in 25% of stories examined, up from 19% the week before. McCain, with a crucial victory in South Carolina, was at 23%, a similar level to a week earlier (24%). The fact that Romney generated more coverage than McCain last week—and got considerably more than a week earlier—reflects the volatile nature of the GOP primaries. After his Jan. 8 win in New Hampshire, McCain was the leading Republican newsmaker. When it was Romney’s turn to salvage his candidacy a week later in Michigan, he became the hottest commodity. Winning, it seems, is the best strategy for getting press attention. Huckabee—who finished a distant third in Michigan and a close second in South Carolina—was a significant factor or main newsmaker in 14% of the stories last week, similar to the number he reached a week earlier (12%). Edwards, who was not competitive in Nevada, complained about his lack of media coverage last week. He even made an ad about it for the web. But complaining didn’t seem to help. He was a distant sixth among all candidates at only 6%. Republican Giuliani, pinning his hopes on Florida, was a non-factor at 4%. Thompson, who dropped out of the race on Jan. 22 after a disappointing third in South Carolina, was at only 1.5%
The gap in media interest between Huckabee and Edwards helps explain why 44.5% of the campaign stories last week were mostly about Republicans compared to 40% that were largely about the Democrats. Another 11% of the stories offered a mix of candidates from both parties. That is a reversal from the week before, when Clinton’s surprise win in New Hampshire helped Democrats overshadow Republicans in attention (43% vs. 32%). The Campaign Coverage index, which will appear weekly until nominees are selected in each party, will be an addition to PEJ’s NCI report, which tracks what stories the media covered in the previous week. The new 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, thanks to the crowded primary calendar, the Presidential campaign was overwhelmingly the top story, accounting for 39% of the newshole from Jan. 14-20, as measured by PEJ’s News Coverage Index--although that number is down from 49% a week earlier. The campaign consumed the cable news networks, which devoted 65% of the time examined to the race last week. It also accounted for 42% of the airtime on radio, a platform that includes the radio talk hosts. The virtual tie between Clinton and Obama in the coverage competition may be a function of two candidates who became entangled in increasingly heated and unpleasant exchanges over racial and personal issues, which was a major factor in the coverage last week. The story line had started the week before with Clinton remarks that were seen by some as diminishing Rev. Martin Luther King’s role in the struggle for civil rights legislation. (A New York Times editorial said that despite Clinton’s efforts to “reframe the quote, the feeling hung in the air that she was denigrating America’s most revered black leader.”) To fight back, the Clintons enlisted Black Entertainment Television Founder Robert Johnson, whose remarks became chapter two in the media saga. While speaking at a Clinton event in South Carolina, Johnson seemed to refer to Obama’s past drug use. Last week, Johnson apologized to Obama as the two campaigns struggled to impose what was widely described as a “truce.” That truce did not appear to take hold in the Jan. 19 Nevada caucuses where, at least in Las Vegas, ill will permeated a battle won by Clinton 51%-45%. A Los Angeles Times account of the event described as part of an “increasingly nasty fight on the Democratic side” with both camps “trading charges of intimidation and voter suppression.” In the GOP storyline last week, Romney entered Michigan desperately needing a win. His victory over McCain not only revitalized his candidacy, it prompted pundits to wonder if he had finally found his voice with a newfound emphasis on jobs. “The clunky chimera candidate who tried so hard to prove his conservative credentials had become a model of simplicity with one major theme,” declared a Time.com piece posted on Yahoo News. But with his three-point victory over Huckabee in South Carolina, a state that effectively ended his 2000 campaign, John McCain also fared well in the media narrative last week. If that didn’t quite make the Arizona senator the man to beat in the fluid GOP race, it got him within hailing distance, according to some journalists. “McCain has the opportunity to take control of the Republican race” with a win in the Jan. 29 Florida primary, The Washington Post stated. “A victory there would establish him as the clear front-runner heading toward Super Tuesday…” Huckabee was largely portrayed as badly, if not quite mortally, wounded by his loss in South Carolina, a state with a large conservative and evangelical population. But nothing is close to being settled on the GOP side, with a Jan. 20 New York Times headline neatly summing things up in three words: “No Quick Knockouts.” And now, in the rest of the week’s news: Although the 2008 campaign was easily the top story of the week, its chunk of the newshole did fall 10 points from the previous week (from 49% to 39%). That’s probably because a substantial second story emerged last week—the increasingly troubled U.S. economy, which filled 12% of the newshole. That is three times more than any other story earned a week earlier while competing for space with the campaign coverage. (The economy accounted for 18% in newspapers and 16% in network TV.) At some points during the past year, that 12% would have been enough to constitute the leading story of the week, but during the rush of primary season it is a very distant second. After the economy, there was a major drop off down to the next three stories—President Bush’s trip to the Middle East (2%), the case of murdered Marine Maria Lauterbach (2%) and the impact of the Iraq war on the homefront (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. 
With the campaign primary season in full swing, the most popular conservative voices in talk radio last week seemed to take sides in the crowded Republican presidential field.
3. U.S. Economy - 3% 4. Iran - 3% 5. Events in Iraq - 3% 6. Missing Marine - 3% 7. Pakistan - 2% 8. Bank of America Buys Countrywide - 2% 9. Tornadoes - 1% 10. Sir Edmund Hillary Dies - 1% Click here to read the methodology behind the Talk Show Index.
Senator Hillary Clinton’s poll-defying Democratic primary
 victory in New Hampshire helped make her the leading campaign newsmaker last week, but the resurrection in the Granite State of John McCain’s once-dead campaign did not translate into similar largesse of media attention, according to a new study of media campaign coverage. Meanwhile, the meaning of third place was also fungible last week. Mike Huckabee, a distant third in the GOP race, got sizably more media attention than did John Edwards among the Democrats. And New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who is not running, got nearly as much coverage for showing up at a conference in Oklahoma as Rudolph Giuliani did for finishing fourth among Republicans. These are some of the findings in the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s inaugural Campaign Coverage Index, a measure of which candidate is winning in the all-important race for media exposure. From January 6 through 11, two days before the New Hampshire primary, the primary day, and the three days following, 37% of all campaign stories were either primarily or significantly about Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama came next at 32%, followed by John McCain at 24% and Mitt Romney at 19%.
The coverage of the third-place finishers in New Hampshire may also say less about results and more about the expectations game. Edwards—who finished second in Iowa and third in New Hampshire—was far behind in the race for media exposure at 7%. Huckabee—who won Iowa and finished a distant third in New Hampshire—ended up a significant factor or main newsmaker in 12% of the stories. That may reflect the media consensus that while Huckabee is still alive in a fluid GOP race, the Democratic fight has largely been winnowed down to a Clinton-Obama contest. The suddenly more competitive Democratic race also attracted more media attention last week than the wide-open GOP race. All told, 43% of campaign stories were mostly about Democrats, while Republicans dominated 32%. Another 19% were about candidates in both parties. That higher level of coverage of Democrats, however, also continues the trend of more attention to Democrats that PEJ has monitored for much of the campaign since January of 2007. That focus on Clinton’s surprising win infused much of the media punditry following New Hampshire. But perhaps no media figure put it in edgier terms than Fox’s News’ Brit Hume, who on election night said, “People had written finis to the Clinton era. And guess what? They’re baaaack.” The Campaign Coverage index, which will appear weekly until nominees are selected in each party, will be an addition to PEJ’s NCI report, which tracks what stories the media covered in the previous week. The new 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.
Interestingly, the differences in the amount of media coverage among the top contenders in both parties last week quite closely reflected the margins in the New Hampshire vote. Clinton, who defeated Obama by three percentage points outdistanced him in coverage by five points. On the GOP side, McCain, who bested Romney by 5 points in New Hampshire, outdid him in coverage by five points as well. Coverage of the presidential race completely overshadowed every other news story last week. The campaign filled 49% of the overall newshole from Jan. 6-11, as measured by PEJ’s News Coverage Index. The topic filled more than half the newshole in three media sectors—53% of the airtime on radio, 54% of the time on network news, and a stunning 66% of the newshole on cable news. The next biggest story filled 4% of the newshole. Clinton emerged not only as leading newsmaker last week, she had an even bigger edge when it came to the number of stories in which she was the dominant figure (making up at least 50% of the story). Clinton was the dominant or primary newsmaker in fully 25% of the stories, vs. 16% for Obama, 15% for McCain and 9% for Romney. The Narratives: From Clinton’s Roller Coaster to McCain’s Saving Comeback Clinton: The week of Jan. 6-11 represented a roller coaster ride for Clinton. On Jan. 7, she was given virtually no chance of beating Obama in New Hampshire. ABC’s Good Morning America rolled out a new poll showing him with a 10-point lead (39% to 29%) while co-host Diane Sawyer declared that, “Senator Clinton has to ramp it up as she has never done before…She’s pulling out everything in her arsenal.” The news was no cheerier on Election Day, when NBC anchor Brian Williams warned of a “shakeup in the Clinton campaign” and correspondent Andrea Mitchell said Clinton’s best hope seemed to be “avoid a big defeat…” The very future of her presidential bid seemed in some jeopardy. Then the votes were counted and the pundits were stunned. Election night was full of mea culpa. The next morning on NPR, correspondent Mara Liasson was asked simply, “What happened?” “I would say,” Liasson answered, “Hillary Clinton has earned the label ‘Comeback Kid’ even more than her husband.” By Jan. 10, some of the coverage had already come full circle. A Forbes.com piece posted on Google carried a headline after New Hampshire that read: “Clinton The Favorite Once Again.” Obama: For Obama, one could see the reverse in the coverage’s trajectory. “There is talk and evidence of an Obama wave moving through this state on the eve of its primary,” declared ABC anchor Charles Gibson on Jan. 7. The first sentence of the Page One story in the Washington Post on primary day talked matter of factly of Obama “anticipating a victory.” Some quarters of the commentariat were already anointing Obama as the likely Democratic nominee (as Fox News Channel commentator and New York Times columnist William Kristol did). Two days later, concluding that the voters in Iowa and New Hampshire had “settled little,” the Jan. 10 front-page story in the Wall Street Journal called the race a jump ball, noting that there is "no clear front-runner in either party.” McCain: For McCain, New Hampshire was depicted as pivotal. Expectations were such that a loss there might have been portrayed as a devastating failure. A Jan. 7 Associated Press story, which featured a tight poll slightly favoring McCain over Romney (34% to 30%), declared that the “stakes this week are especially high…. McCain has put all his focus on a New Hampshire victory that would repeat his success here eight years ago.” That evening, PBS’ Judy Woodruff offered a foreshadowing of his victory. “McCain is pulling crowds here he hasn’t seen in months,” she observed. Despite the expectations, when the win came, McCain was treated along with Clinton as one of the “Comeback Kids.” “John McCain surges from his summer slump as ‘Comeback Kid’ for Republicans,” declared Harry Smith on the Jan. 9 edition of CBS’ Early Show as Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” blared in the background. Romney: After he was damaged by his loss to Huckabee in Iowa, the media portrayed New Hampshire as an important but not necessarily decisive test for Romney. He “needs a victory to prove his candidacy isn’t crippled after an Iowa drubbing,” concluded the Jan. 7 Associated Press story. And there was buzz from some journalists at the eleventh hour that he might even get it. When he then lost to McCain, the story quickly moved to Michigan, Romney’s home state, and the stakes in the media narrative got significantly higher. One could sense in the coverage Romney trying to fend off just those expectations. In a Jan. 11 Today interview with Romney. Meredith Vieira pointedly noted that “a lot of people are saying that Tuesday’s primary in Michigan could be make or break…” Romney responded by saying “I’m planning on winning in Michigan.” But when Vieira asked if it was now a must-win state for him, Romney said “I’d like to win, of course, and I’m sure I’ll come in first or second.” Huckabee: For Huckabee, as it was for McCain in Iowa, the news of the week was about how third or fourth place can be spun as a good thing. Huckabee’s dramatic win in Iowa provided him with extensive coverage, but the expectations were never high for him in New Hampshire, a fact often attributed in the press to its much smaller population of evangelical Christians. Thus the media narrative was largely that Huckabee would not do particularly well, but would live to fight another day—most likely in South Carolina. This was a case of almost getting a pass. In a report filed from South Carolina on Jan. 9, CNN’s Dana Bash said the Huckabee campaign was optimistic that “he can and should do well here [because] just like inside Iowa, there is a large contingent of evangelicals, Christian conservatives…” Bash also noted that while Huckabee had avoided talking a lot about social issues in more libertarian New Hampshire, his pro-life views had again taken center stage. Thus just as a Hillary victory in New Hampshire was all the more powerful because it was unexpected, a distant third place could prove harmless for Huckabee, much more so than it proved to be for Edwards. And now, in the rest of the week’s news: While the campaign overwhelmingly dominated coverage last week, three of the remaining top five stories emanated from the troubled Middle East. President Bush’s ambitious two-pronged mission to the region to encourage progress in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and rally regional allies against Iran, would, in other circumstances, have been a major story. Last week, it accounted for only 4% of the newshole as the second-biggest story of the week. (It did generate 12% of the online coverage.) Growing concerns about the R-Word (recession) made the U.S. economy the third-biggest story at 3%. And the next two stories involved Mideast hotspots. The close call between Iranian speedboats and the U.S. Navy in the Straight of Hormuz made Iran the fourth-biggest story at 3%, while events on the ground in Iraq—dominated by news of a U.S. offensive against Al-Qaeda—also generated 3% of the coverage. Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ
Click here to see the top ten stories for each media sector. Click here to see the methodology for the Campaign Coverage Index. The Project for Excellence in Journalism did not issue a News Index report this week. View our Top Ten Story List The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism did not publishing a full Weekly News Index report for November 22-28, 2007. PEJ is, however, making the data available. View the week's Top Ten Story List “The polls are now just awful for the Hillary campaign,” he declared. “There’s a lot of infighting now being reported. Not only is she losing in Iowa, now the polls show she is losing in New Hampshire.” The former First Lady didn’t fare much better on the Dec. 10 edition of MSNBC’s Hardball when host Chris Matthews announced his weekly “power rankings.” (That’s a concept lifted from the sports world where teams are constantly evaluated and rated according to their most recent performances.) “Who had the absolute worst week last week?” asked Matthews. “Hillary Clinton. She spent her time sniping at Obama….she came off less inspired and simply annoyed this past week that someone else was exciting the crowd.” With more manifest glee, conservative radio talker Rush Limbaugh reached for a Wizard of Oz wicked witch analogy in discussing the Clinton campaign’s purported troubles. People have been emailing all morning “asking me ‘do you believe it’s the end for Hillary?’” Limbaugh remarked on Dec. 14. “Until I see the house fall on her…and the legs curl up [and] the body in the casket, she is not dead, she is not finished.” With the apparent tightening Democratic contest between Clinton and Barack Obama, the 2008 Presidential campaign overwhelmed the talk universe last week. The subject accounted for half of all the airtime (50%) in the cable and radio shows studied in PEJ’s Talk Show Index from Dec. 9-14. That made it the single biggest week for the campaign on the 12 talk shows in the index, topping the previous high water mark of 47% from Nov. 11-16. (Last week also marked the biggest week for campaign coverage (26%) in the general News Coverage Index, which measures coverage in 48 different news outlets.) The second-biggest talk topic last week was U.S. domestic terrorism. It was fueled by the controversy over the destroyed terrorist interrogation tapes, but it lagged far behind the campaign in airtime (at 12%). Next was the steroids scandal blown wide open by the release of the report issued by former Senator George Mitchell last week, which accounted for 6% of airtime. The fourth-biggest story was immigration policy, at 5%. And various stories about the Christmas season made up the fifth-biggest story, at 3%. PEJ’s Talk Show Index, released each week, 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 seven prime time cable shows and five radio talk hosts and is a subset of our News Coverage Index. There was plenty to talk about last week in the campaign, including two Iowa debates (the moderator was widely criticized for imposing too much control), Mike Huckabee’s surge toward the top of the Republican pack, and the Oprah Winfrey road show on behalf of Barack Obama. But Hillary Clinton’s role as the candidate of most interest to the media, and especially as a lightning rod in talk radio, continues to stand out. PEJ studies throughout the year have found Clinton to be dominant newsmaker among all the candidates. In the period from July through September, indeed, she was the leading newsmaker in roughly twice as many campaign stories (16%) as her closest coverage rivals, Barack Obama and Fred Thompson (both at 8%). Clinton’s dominance as a subject is amplified on talk radio. In the third quarter, she was the lead newsmaker in 31% of all talk campaign segments in that period with the closest pursuer, Obama, all the way back at 7%, according to PEJ’s quarterly analysis. Moreover, talk radio is a medium dominated by conservatives and led by Rush Limbaugh, a man who has built a six-figure audience and income, in part, by going after Bill and Hillary Clinton since the early 1990’s. Last week, for example, while conservative talkers such as Limbaugh and Hannity were hammering away on the theme of Clinton’s faltering campaign, their liberal counterparts Ed Schultz and Randi Rhodes were much quieter on the election. In a Dec. 19 Washington Post story, media critic Howard Kurtz raised the broader issue of whether Clinton was being treated more harshly by the press than her opponents—or at least her main rival Obama. “Clinton's senior advisers have grown convinced that the media deck is stacked against them, that their candidate is drawing far harsher scrutiny than Barack Obama,” Kurtz wrote. If they didn’t like what they were getting in the reportorial media, they may need to shut their ears when the talk media are on. On his Dec. 10 MSNBC show Tucker Carlson declared that, “By most of the standard measures—polls, money, press and perceived trajectory—it is less and less clear that Hillary Clinton is still the Democratic frontrunner and Barack Obama the challenger.” That message was driven home visually four nights later on the Fox News Channel’s Hannity & Colmes program. There the campaign conversation included a YouTube video showing a former Clinton precinct captain in Iowa ostentatiously pulling her Clinton sign out of her snowy front lawn and replacing it with an Obama sign. Politico’s Mike Allen captured the spirit of that moment by noting that, “I saw today Senator Clinton’s campaign described as ‘fragile.’” Between those hosts ideologically and unalterably opposed to Hillary Clinton and those simply hoping for the excitement of a tighter Democratic race, the talk universe was abuzz with “Hillary’s in Trouble” scenarios last week. Savage, Steroids, and a Soft Spot for Bonds The furor unleashed when the Mitchell report identified about 90 ballplayers who allegedly used performance-enhancing drugs didn’t really catch fire in the talk show world last week. At 6% of the newshole, it generated slightly less attention there than in the more general News Index (7%). Ironically, one of the talk hosts to broach the issue was conservative contrarian Michael Savage, even though he acknowledged he is not a sports fan. Still, that didn’t keep him from claiming clairvoyance when the Mitchell report was released. “I understand there’s a big steroid scandal in the baseball world,” Savage told his listeners on Dec. 13. “I was right again. When they went after Barry Bonds, if you recall, I was the only one in the media who said ‘leave him alone, it looks like racism to me to pick on this guy.’ You’re picking on him when everybody is using steroids or at least a lot of them are.” Maybe the San Francisco-based Savage was just showing some geographic loyalty. Bonds played in his city the past 15 years. Whatever the reason, it was more of a classically liberal argument for the conservative Savage to be using the R-word (racism) in Bonds’ defense. Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ
4. Immigration - 5% 5. Holiday Season - 3% 6. Iran - 2% 7. Iraq Policy Debate - 1% 8. Global Warming - 1% 9. U.S. Economy - 1% 10. C.I.A. Leak Case- 1% Top Ten Stories in the broader News Coverage Index 1. 2008 Campaign - 26% 2. Baseball Steroids Scandal - 7%3. U.S. Domestic Terrorism and Prevention - 7% 4. Deep Freeze in Plain States - 6% 5. Events in Iraq - 4% 6. U.S. Economy - 3% 7. Colorado Church Shootings - 3% 8. Global Warming - 3% 9. Immigration - 2% 10. Algerian UN Blast - 2% Click here to read the methodology behind the Talk Show Index. |
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With the Republican outcome a formality, coverage overwhelming went the other way last week, with 60% of the campaign stories mostly about Democrats and only 24% primarily involving the GOP. Romney’s endorsement of McCain helped make the former Massachusetts Governor a significant or dominant newsmaker in 6% of that Republican coverage.
On the Republican side, McCain was every bit a match for the top Democrats in attention. A significant or dominant factor in 42% of the campaign stories examined, for the second week in a row he led all candidates in coverage—albeit by a hair. And outdistanced his nearest GOP rival by two-to-one. By winning the big Super Tuesday states on Feb. 5, McCain cemented his status in the media’s collective judgment as presumptive nominee.
