Obama got positive coverage, here and nationally

ON THE DAY after Virginia's primary election, students in Fred Schecker's intro to journalism class wanted some explanations about how The Virginian-Pilot covered the outcome. They were unanimous on one conclusion: "The newspaper was biased in favor of Obama."

Schecker, an adjunct teacher at Old Dominion University, characterized his students as "younger, infrequent readers" of The Pilot.

Their passing acquaintance with the newspaper hardly qualifies them as reliable critics. But what's surprising about their assessment of one day's coverage is how it echoes the conclusion of comprehensive national studies of how the media have covered the 2008 presidential campaign. The first of those studies established that Illinois Sen. Barack Obama has routinely enjoyed the "most positive treatment of the major candidates" during the first half of 2007, a trend that has continued in subsequent studies of press coverage.

Some of the criticisms leveled by Schecker's students are misplaced. After all, Obama did gain nearly 64 percent of the primary vote in Virginia. But in their perception of uneven coverage in the "Local voters speak" display at the top of the front page on Feb. 13, the students' criticism was echoed by other readers.

That feature is a perfect illustration of how decisions about news presentation are driven by a clearly defined goal. But when the execution falls short, the result is construed by readers as evidence of favoritism and bias.

Geography was a key consideration in the "local voters" concept. A cross section of voters in The Pilot's main five-city circulation area gave readers a sampling of local sentiments in the Republican and Democratic presidential contests.

However, the reporter-photographer teams dispatched to Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Suffolk and Portsmouth came up short. The array of photos and voter quotes did not produce a perfect mix in the context of age, race, gender and candidate preference. In a sense, the editors became prisoners of their own idea.

The result that readers saw was two 40-year-old black women who voted for Obama; two older white men, one from Suffolk who voted for Hillary Clinton, the other a John McCain supporter from Portsmouth. A Ron Paul supporter from Virginia Beach rounded out the lineup.

"With five candidates in the race, why wasn't a Huckabee supporter among those quoted?" one student asked, especially since two Obama voters claimed space. And Huckabee did pull in nearly 41 percent of the vote statewide in the Republican primary.

The problem was that reporters unearthed only one Huckabee voter in their five-city foray. His comments essentially damned the candidate with faint praise. He had cast his vote for Huckabee as a way of telling McCain that his brand of conservatism was unacceptable.

"We created too complicated a puzzle for ourselves," acknowledged Maria Carrillo, The Pilot's managing editor.

Bill Bartel, state editor, said that although the imbalance was obvious as the page was put together on election night, it was too late to go back and correct the problem. As a result, Bartel conceded, "The perception was that we deliberately kept Mike Huckabee out of the paper." He and Carrillo insist that their intent, as always, was to play it straight and, above all, be devoid of ideology.

Those protestations notwithstanding, on the national scene the press in general has made Obama a media darling. And since The Pilot had relied almost exclusively on the national media for its coverage of the presidential race, the results have relevance for Hamptom Roads' readers.

The national study undertaken by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) and Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy analyzed campaign coverage by newspapers, radio, television and talk radio beginning in January 2007, when Sens. Clinton and Obama announced plans to seek the Democratic nomination.

The study, which looked at 1,742 campaign stories from 48 news outlets during the first five months of 2007, established a measure for tone and counted the positive and negative stories about the four leading candidates. Clinton and Obama were the top two Democrats. McCain and Rudolph Giuliani were then considered the top two GOP contenders.

The results are astonishing. Obama outpaced the three other contenders in the count of positive to negative stories by three to one. Moreover, while Obama scored 47 percent positives to 16 percent negatives, the other three candidates all had more negatives than positives.

PEJ studies done since June 2007, although not as comprehensive as that earlier analysis, provide a clear indication that the pro-Obama posture still holds.

"Journalists love the new story. It doesn't fit any of their models, except in its novelty," said Tom Patterson, the Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at Harvard University. "Hillary is being hammered."

At the same time, the press overlooks signs of imperfection in the Obama campaign. Michelle Obama's statement that called into question her willingness to back a Democratic ticket led by anyone but her husband, for example, would have created a firestorm had Bill Clinton done the same. But with Obama, in Patterson's words, "it sank like a stone."

Whether that pattern holds will be worth watching. Is the press playing favorites with Obama? Probably. What's important, however, is that when the media scrutiny of Obama begins, that it is based on something more than a self-serving effort to bring America's newest superstar - one they doubtless helped to invent - down to size.

Joyce Hoffmann is the public editor. Reach her at (757) 446-2475 or public. editor@pilotonline.com.