Press treatment becomes issue in campaign

[sueragingroz]

I decided to give my third and last post to the International Herald Tribune.

Press treatment becomes issue in campaign
By Jacques Steinberg Published: March 2, 2008

On the bus ferrying a group of reporters to an appearance by Senator Barack Obama at Ohio State University on Wednesday, Lee Cowan, the NBC reporter assigned to the Illinois senator's presidential campaign, was asked the media question of the week: Had journalists like him been going easier on Obama than his opponent for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton?

"I don't think that it's kind treatment versus unkind treatment," Cowan began, taking issue with the depiction of journalists fawning over Obama in a recent "Saturday Night Live" skit, a characterization stoked nearly every day since by the New York senator and her aides.

And yet, Cowan then described several advantages that he saw Obama as having over his rival. "He hasn't been around as long, so there isn't as much to pick at," Cowan said. "He plays everything very cool. He's not as much of a lightning rod."

"Even in the conversations we have as colleagues, there is a sense of trying especially hard not to drink the Kool-Aid," Cowan said, "It's so rapturous, everything around him. All these huge rallies."

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In a New York Times/CBS News telephone poll conducted Feb. 20-24 and issued last Tuesday, nearly half of those respondents who described themselves as voters in Democratic primaries or caucuses said the news media had been "harder" on Clinton than other candidates. Only about 1 in 10 suggested the news media had been harder on Obama.

On Wednesday, Carrie Budoff Brown, a correspondent for the Web site Politico who has been covering the Obama campaign, posted an article in which she complained about the candidate's setting aside little time for questions from the national news media and about the metal barriers that now prevented reporters from mingling with spectators at rallies. David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Obama, said the barriers were at the behest of the Secret Service.

(snip for brevity)

Others marshaled clippings indicating that Obama had been subject to more serious scrutiny than the Clintons would acknowledge. These include articles from Lynn Sweet, the Washington bureau chief of The Chicago Sun-Times, examining Obama's flights on corporate jets early in his Senate career and the literary license he took on his first memoir. They also noted articles about Obama's relationship with Antoin Rezko, a former fund-raiser soon to be tried on federal charges of fraud and influence peddling.

"The number of questions that we don't know the answers to about the relationship between Rezko and Obama is staggering," Howard Wolfson, a top aide to Clinton, said on a conference call with reporters on Friday.

I encourage you to read the entire article.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/02/america/fair.php