A First Look at Coverage of the 2008 Presidential Campaign

The Early Start, the Public and the Press

This election is unprecedented in terms of its early start and how much early coverage it received. By February 2007, nearly 11 months before any citizen would cast a primary vote or gather for a caucus, the race became one of the biggest stories in the news. This coverage reflected the candidates’ early and heavy fundraising, earlier-than-ever announcements, and states trying to move up their primaries, caucuses and conventions in the election year calendar. For the first five months of 2007, the campaign was the second-most covered news story of any in the press. It lagged behind only the debate over the war in Iraq, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s News Coverage Index (www.journalism.org). News about the 2008 campaign accounted for 7.6% of the space in newspapers and websites and airtime on TV and radio included in the Index.

What political scientists used to call the “Invisible Primary” of endorsements, fundraising and organizational work, in other words, is invisible no longer.

That early start, however, has posed something of a challenge for the press. According to survey data from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, fewer than a quarter of Americans were closely following the election during the period

examined here, January through May 2007.² That is high by historical standards, nearly double the level of interest found at similar periods during the 2004 and 2000 presidential elections. Still, it represents relatively limited public attention and presents a conundrum for journalists.

The question for the press is this: How to cover a campaign so early, when so many candidates are competing in both parties so early, but only a limited number of citizens are paying close attention and

Percentage of People Following Campaign News Very Fairly Closely Closely

Source: Pew Research Center for People and the Press September 28 – October 1, 2007

there is still a long way to go until voting day?

Does focusing on the game aspects of the campaign—political tactics and strategy—make the coverage more exciting and draw more people in to the news? Or does the “game frame” appeal to a narrower news audience?

Most citizens, whether they are following the campaign closely or not, have some clear ideas of the kind of coverage they prefer. In a new poll produced for this report by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, nearly eight-in-ten Americans (77%) say they want more coverage of “the candidates’ positions on issues” than they are getting. Just 17% say they want less coverage of candidates’ positions.

Smaller majorities also said they want to see more stories about second-tier candidates (55%), about debates (57%) and about sources of campaign money (55%). And another 55% was interested in more coverage of the personal backgrounds and experiences of the candidates.

The public is more divided over stories about the where the candidates stand in the polls, the so-called horse race (42% want more stories about this topic, while 45% want less). These figures are similar to those from earlier elections.

Those results, taken together with the findings of the PEJ-Shorenstein study of coverage, suggest the press and the public are not on the same page when it comes to priorities in campaign coverage. This disparity also indicates there is room for the press

² Based on results from the News Interest Index, a weekly survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. The News Interest Index has measured public interest in news about candidates for the 2008 presidential election on a weekly basis throughout 2007.

to calibrate its coverage differently to make it more useful and possibly more interesting to citizens.

The public is also not that happy with the press coverage. A majority of Americans (53%) in September said the coverage has been only fair or poor, while 41% rate it as good or excellent, according to another Pew Research Center survey.³

What the Study Examined

By analyzing the news of the campaign from January to May, we can see what kind of coverage the American media think the public wants and needs. The PEJ-Shorenstein study looked at five basic aspects of the stories.

First, we identified what each story was about, topic. Next, we identified the primary figure the story was focused around. Was it a particular candidate, a group of candidates, or others? Third, we examined who was affected by what the story was about, impact. Was it citizens? Politicians? Interest groups? Or a combination?

In addition to these measurements, the study also noted two other features for each story.

We considered what initiated the story, its trigger: Was it something a candidate said or did? Something from a campaign surrogate? An outsider? Or was the story initiated by journalistic enterprise?

Finally, the study measured the tone of each story. Within its frame, was the story predominantly positive, negative or neutral about the candidates or their electoral prospects? In order to fall into the positive or negative category, two-thirds or more of the assertions in a story had to fall clearly on one side of that line or the other.

Election Topics

From the start, the press has tended to produce stories about one candidate at a time, rather than ones that compare candidates or examine broad themes. Fully eight out of 10 stories in the first five months focused mostly on a single candidate. The other 20% of stories concerned comparisons of candidates, electoral issues, the electorate and the rest.

The majority of all stories (63%) were primarily about the “game” aspects of the campaign—topics such as who is winning, who is losing, their fundraising, and how a candidate is performing on the stump. Of these topics, the lion’s share (50% overall) was

³ “Modest Interest in 2008 Campaign News.” Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. October 23, 2007.

tactical or horse race—that is polls, strategy and candidate “performance.” The next biggest political concern was campaign fundraising, which made up 7% of all stories.

After internal political matters, the secondbiggest grouping of topics (17% of the stories) focused on the personal background of the candidates—their families, marriages, biographies, and religion. The biggest share of these stories, 9%, looked at the marriage and romantic relationships of the candidates and the personal health of candidates and their spouses. This obviously was driven in March by the announcement by Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of Democratic candidate John Edwards, that she had a recurrence of breast cancer. And 2% of the stories were about candidate religion, principally that of Republican Mitt Romney, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

The policy proposals and ideas of the candidates constituted 15% of all stories examined—a slightly smaller percentage than the personal qualities of the candidates. This policy discussion was fairly evenly split between foreign (8%) and domestic policy (7%). Of the issues, the war was the biggest of all (6%). That was followed by abortion (3%), though much of this coverage focused on Republicans and particularly Giuliani, whose position on that subject does not fit squarely into what has become the tradition in the Republican Party platform.

Only roughly 1% of the stories were about the candidates’ public records.

Political advertising made up only 1% of the coverage, since most candidates had not yet gotten their ad campaigns going this early in the race. Almost all of the ad stories in the early phase were about an ad that was not created by a candidate, but was an independent Internet attack ad produced on YouTube by an anonymous user. The ad portrayed Hillary Clinton as part of the political Old Guard and promoted the candidacy of Barack Obama. All but one of the stories about advertising from January to May involved this one spot.

A major issue for campaign insiders is not the candidates themselves but the campaign calendar, including states moving the dates for their primaries earlier and earlier in the 2008 year–possibly into December 2007. Yet in spite of the enormous impact of the electoral calendar on voters and outcome, the subject got only minor coverage (2% of the stories in the first months of the campaign).

While every campaign seems to bring complaints of excessive media emphasis on strategy over issues, these topic breakdowns in the early stages of the 2008 cycle are

Topics by Party

So far in 2007, tactics, polling and fundraising dominated coverage of both parties (Democrats at 59%, Republicans at 65%).

A closer look at the topic breakdowns reveals a marked difference between the coverage of Democrats and Republicans, particularly with regard to personal and policy issues. The coverage of Democrats was more personal. The coverage of Republicans was more about ideas.

Roughly a quarter (24%) of the stories devoted to Democrats focused on personal topics, compared with only 13% of the coverage of Republican candidates.

Policy stories, by contrast, made up much more of the coverage of Republicans (20%) than they did for Democrats (12%).

Heavy coverage of Elizabeth Edwards’ illness accounts for part, but hardly all of the difference between Democratic and Republican candidates’ personal coverage. It also may be that the perceived points of contrast among Democrats in the early phases had

⁴ The 2004 PEJ study examined theme-based stories, rather than all topics of election coverage. Even here, in a narrowed range of stories, politics accounted for more than half of the coverage. Another study that focused on the primary campaign season was of network evening television coverage in 2004 conducted by Stephen Farnsworth and Robert Lichter. Their work showed an even higher percentage, 77%, of the primary season election stories were focused on horse race issues and only 18% were focused on policy issues. Stephen J. Farnsworth and S. Robert Lichter. 2007. The Nightly News Nightmare: Television’s Coverage of U.S. Presidential Elections, 1988-2004. 2d ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ⁵ Marion R. Just, Ann N. Crigler, Dean E. Alger, Timothy E. Cook, Montague Kern, and Darrell M. West 1996, Crosstalk: Citizens, Candidates and the Media in a Presidential Campaign. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996.

more to do with biography—including the candidates’ gender, race, and marriages— whereas the differences among Republicans may have been sharper over policy— particularly on such issues as immigration and abortion.

Impact

The question of whether voters are well served by coverage is not strictly a matter of what the story is ostensibly about. Any topic may be relevant to helping voters discern differences among candidates. How candidates run their campaigns, for instance, may be a proxy for how they would run the country.

To probe further into this, the PEJ-Shorenstein study tried to isolate whether the information in stories was relevant or not to helping people decide how to vote. One way of doing this is to note who was primarily affected or impacted by the information the story was talking about. We called this measurement impact.

Did the information in the story mostly refer to how candidates might govern, i.e., what they believe in, their values, management style, personality and other similar matters? Or was it about matters that impact the candidates’ or parties’ chances of election? Or did the story deal with both the governance and electoral chances?

A story about tactics and strategy might be produced in such a way that tells a good deal about a candidate, his or her leadership or decision-making style. A story that simply outlines the numbers in a new poll, in contrast, would have to be described as impacting mainly the candidate and his or her campaign. If any useful information for citizens could be inferred concerning substance rather than strategy, the story coding defaulted toward impact on citizens.

The “impact” analysis showed that the coverage was tilted even more toward

strategy than analysis of the topic of the stories.

In the end, just 12% of stories primarily impacted ordinary citizens, for instance. by telling potential voters how a candidate might lead if elected.

By contrast, 86% of the stories were produced in a way that largely focused on how the politicians’ chances of election would be affected.

This focus on political matters varied little by media. The most citizenoriented coverage came from newspapers (about 18% compared to 79% oriented toward politicians). The least citizenoriented coverage was found in network TV (9% vs. 89%). Online, cable, and radio were all somewhere in the middle.

There is a familiar pattern here. In a PEJ study of the same question in the early 2000 presidential contest, the numbers were remarkably similar, 13% of stories impacted citizens and 82% were about the impact on candidates, the campaigns and the parties. Studies of later periods in the campaign found slightly more citizen focused coverage, though not dramatically so. ⁶

These numbers suggest that coverage becomes more citizen-oriented as the election draws closer. It remains to be seen whether that might happen sooner in a campaign that started earlier. So far, the coverage is as focused as usual, if not more so, on what critics call the inside baseball of politics.

It is also important to note that projections of candidate viability and electability are important pieces of information for primary voters, compared with general election voters. In primary elections with several competing candidates, many citizens may not want to “waste” their votes on candidates who have no chance for the nomination or who are likely to lose the general election.

The Competition for Exposure

For individual candidates, and to some extent even for parties, another key question of the campaign is who is winning the race for exposure—or what political professionals sometimes call “free media.” It is free, in the sense that advertising exposure must be paid for, while press coverage is not.⁷

Which candidates and which parties are winning the derby for press exposure?

In the first five months of the campaign, the media found Democrats more newsworthy than Republicans. From January through May 2007, nearly half of 2008

⁶ “In The Public Interest: A content study of early coverage of the 2000 election campaign,” December 1999 and January 2000. The study found 13% of the stories impacted citizens by giving them useful information about governance, and 82% impacted the chances of the candidates, the parties, and the campaigns. Later in that race, in the final weeks of the 2000 general election phase, the numbers in another PEJ study were different, though not dramatically so. In that later study of this period, “The Debate Effect: How the Press covered the Pivotal Period,” slightly more than a quarter of stories (27%) impacted citizens’ information needs and 64% focused on the candidates’ or parties. A third PEJ campaign report, “The Last Lap: How the press covered the final stages of the campaign,” issued in the closing weeks of the 2004 race between Bush and John Kerry found that 20% of the stories contained information that related to citizens’ information needs, while 73% were oriented to how the candidates would be affected.

⁷ Some political consultants over time, perhaps to suggest that they deserved credit for press coverage, began to call the press the “earned media.”

election stories, 49%, focused on Democratic candidates, while less than a third, 31%, focused on Republicans. More than half of this difference can be accounted for by the fact that Democrats started announcing their campaigns a month earlier than Republicans. It is worth noting, however, that the gap existed in other months as well, and also was reflected in all the media platforms studied, including some, such as talk radio and Fox News, that argue they are counterbalancing liberal bias in the media. In three of different news sectors—morning network shows, evening network news, and talk radio—the radio of Democratic to Republican was nearly 2 to 1.

That statistic alone does not fully describe the press’ focus. Of the 18 candidates running, even in the early months of the race, the media were concerned with only a handful of contenders.

Five candidates—two Democrats and three Republicans—were the focus of more than half of the coverage (52%). These included New York Senator Hillary Clinton and Illinois Senator Barack Obama among the Democrats and former New York Mayor Rudy

Giuliani, Arizona Senator John McCain, and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in the Republican field.⁸

While Hillary Clinton led in the derby for press exposure (she was the primary subject in 17% of all campaign stories), the largely antagonistic attention of conservative talk radio accounted for

most of that edge. Clinton was the focus of nearly a third of all the campaign segments among the conservative talkers studied (the three most popular conservative radio voices, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Michael Savage). Clinton is not nearly as a popular subject among liberal radio talk show hosts.

The second-most covered candidate, Democratic rival Barack Obama (14% of stories), got a boost in that coverage from being the No. 1 focus of all the candidates from network evening news.

Two Republicans were next in media exposure. Giuliani led among Republicans with 9% of the stories, followed by McCain at 7% and Romney at 5%.

During our study time, the total number of candidates was 19. Four have since dropped out: Tom Vilsack left in February and was included in the study. James Gilmore, Tommy Thompson and more recently Sam Brownback dropped out after the span of our study, and Fred Thompson formally joined the race.

They were followed by former Senators John Edwards (4%) and Fred Thompson (3%), whose level of coverage relative to their party rivals probably puts them in what is best considered a second tier. Interestingly, Thompson, the lobbyist, actor and former Tennessee Senator, enjoyed this level of coverage (and name recognition in polling) even though he did not actually enter the race until September.⁹

The rest of the candidates would have to be considered not second-tier but third, at least in media attention. None received more than 2% of the coverage.

Put another way, of the more than 1,700 campaign stories examined from January to May, Tom Tancredo, Sam Brownback, Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee each were the focus of fewer than a dozen stories. The second tier Democrats fared only slightly better. There were five stories about Chris Dodd, 28 about Bill Richardson, one about Dennis Kucinich, and 41 about Joe Biden. For most, their coverage peaked the day of their announcement and went downhill from there.

How dominant were Clinton and Obama as newsmakers? Together, these two candidates commanded essentially the same amount of coverage as all the of the GOP hopefuls combined.

And there is some evidence the level coverage does have an impact on public awareness. A Pew Research Center survey from September finds that Clinton and Obama are far better recognized than their Republican counterparts. Fully 78% of Americans could name Hillary Clinton as a candidate, and 62% could name Obama. On the GOP side, 45% could name Giuliani as a candidate, while 30% could name Romney, 27% Thompson and 24% John McCain. Exposure in the press, in other words, may be vital to name recognition, which in turn influences polling and fundraising.

Tone

The volume of coverage is one thing. But in politics, not all coverage is equal, even if they spell your name right. What was the tone of the coverage each candidate received?

While Hillary Clinton may have gotten the most press, she did not get the most favorable. That distinction, among major candidates, went to Barack Obama.

On the other end of the ledger, Republican John McCain, the once possible GOP front runner, generated by a wide margin the most negative coverage of any serious contender.

The same ranking of candidates, incidentally, holds true if instead of number of stories, we look at the percent of all time or words devoted to each candidate. Eighteen percent of the total news coverage of the campaign was devoted to Clinton, 14% to Obama, 10% to Giuliani and 7% to McCain.

Interestingly, the two front runners in national polls in each party received nearly identical coverage when it came to overall tone.

To evaluate tone, the study examined every assertion that offered some assessment of a candidate’s chances at winning or their potential effectiveness in office if they were elected and tallied them by story. For a story to be considered positive or negative, two thirds of all the assertions had to be explicitly positive or negative in tone or the story would be considered balanced.

It is important to note that the largest percentage of stories (39%) were balanced or neutral in tone. Another 32% were positive. And 30% were negative.

Those numbers are almost identical to those found in the 2004 PEJ study surrounding the fall debates, in which 37% of the stories carried a neutral tone while 38% were negative and 26% were positive.

How did individual candidates fare?

If the press tries to treat the leaders in a race with greater skepticism—or feels a responsibility to scrub those contenders harder—there is some evidence to support that here. The two front runners in national polls both received somewhat more negative coverage than positive. For Hillary Clinton, 27% of the stories were clearly positive, 38% were negative and 35% were balanced or neutral. For Rudy Giuliani, 28% were positive, 37% negative, and 35% neutral.

And if there is any sense that the press likes candidates who make a race more competitive, the data from the early months of the campaign offer support for that view, too. In this case, this candidate was Obama, the freshman Senator from Illinois. Obama enjoyed the best run of coverage in the early campaign, though the trajectory over time was gradually downward. Taken together, nearly half (47%) of all stories focused on Obama were positive. That is roughly three times the percentage that were negative (16%) and exceeds the 38% of stories that were neutral in tone.

Only one other candidate did nearly so well–then Republican demi-candidate Fred Thompson. Like Obama, he offered the possibility of a wild card figure whose entry might reshuffle the dynamics of the race in new ways. In all, 46% about Thompson carried a clearly positive tone, while more than half (51%) were neutral. Almost none, just 4%, was negative. That stands out as the most pronounced gap (13-to-one) of positive to negative stories of any major candidate. One obvious question is how that might have changed now that he has declared himself as one of the pack.

One argument about press coverage is that it tends to reinforce and therefore magnify any phenomenon it observes. A candidate on a downward spiral may find that pattern harder to change if caught in the media klieg lights. While the coverage of John McCain was not as intense as others, it did stand out for its negative cast. From January through May, close to half (48%) of the stories about McCain were clearly negative in tone—the highest of any major candidate. That was four times the stories with a clearly positive tone (12%). Four-in-ten were neutral. Even Fox News, which treated all the other major Republican candidates to more positive than negative coverage, made an exception of McCain. On Fox, McCain the stories examined were 20% positive, 45% neutral and 35% negative. In the first phase of the campaign, in other words, McCain tended to be the mirror image of Obama.

Mitt Romney, on the other hand, had the more evenly balanced and positive coverage than either McCain or Giuliani—34% of stories were positive, 35% were neutral and 31% were negative. John Edwards’ coverage was also pretty evenly split among the three categories.

After these seven—the top five and the two candidates in the middle--the remaining

The only candidates in this group to receive decidedly more negative coverage than positive were Joe Biden (46% negative vs. 10% positive and 44% neutral) and Tom Tancredo, who was the subject of just seven stories, none of them was clearly positive in tone.

The Candidates

Hillary Clinton – the headline maker

Immediately following her Jan. 20 online announcement of her candidacy, Hillary Clinton embarked on a more conventional media blitz that included a series of network TV interviews. With that, coverage of the 2008 election effectively kicked into high gear at an unprecedented early stage of the campaign. And for the first five months of the year, the former First Lady, now Senator, was the campaign’s leading media attraction.

¹⁰The Pew Research Center for People and the Press “Clinton Seen as 'Tough' and 'Smart' -- Giuliani as 'Energetic':Voter Impressions of Leading Candidates,” September 2007. The survey found that 64% of Democratic voters’ impression of Democratic candidates was excellent/good, while 49% of Republican voters’ impression of Republican candidates was excellent/good.

The New York Senator probably offered more media story lines than any other candidate: A former eight-year occupant of the White House trying to balance her own candidacy with her husband’s looming legacy; the first woman making a serious bid for the Oval Office; the immediate front runner in her party’s national polls; and someone with a reputation as a controversial and even polarizing figure in her own right. That mixed grab bag of narratives helps in part to explain the mixed tone of the stories (38%

negative, 27% positive, and 35% neutral).

Her front-runner status was the primary fascination of the press early on. Fully 56% of Clinton stories were about polls, tactics and performance on the stump in the first five months. Fewer stories than the norm (14% vs. 17% overall) were about her personal background, however, this number that suggests journalists may have felt much of this was already known. As for her ideas for where she would take the country, only one received a significant amount of attention—her position on the war in Iraq (10% of stories), a percentage higher than election coverage overall devoted to the war. The dynamic here may well be that journalists examining a front runner tend to examine possible weakness, in this case the fact that Clinton at first supported the war and changed her position over time.

The tone of Clinton coverage varied a good deal by medium. Newspapers, for example, treated her more favorably (giving her roughly twice the percentage of positive stories as elsewhere).

And a good deal of her negative coverage can be attributed to a media platform that has been taking on the Clinton family since they moved into the White House in 1993. Nearly 20% of the nearly 300 Clinton stories examined in this report aired on

Topics of Hillary Clinton’s Coverage

Percent of All Stories

All

conservative talk radio, a genre that many observers believe found its voice and primary target after Bill Clinton’s 1992 election. In this campaign, conservative talkers in the early months have a new target. Nearly nine-out-of-ten Clinton segments in conservative talk (86%) were clearly negative in tone. The enmity of some of those hosts toward the New York Senator is so pronounced that both Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have on occasional lauded her Democratic rival Barack Obama, with his chief virtue apparently being that he is not Hillary Clinton.

The trajectory of Clinton’s coverage over time followed something of a roller coaster route. Her announcement in January helped make that a largely positive month. Coverage became notably more negative in February. It improved somewhat in March, but it was not until April that the positive again outweighed the negative. Then it slumped again in May.

One factor that remained constant throughout the first five months of the year— and it would help explain the continuing focus on Clinton but not the up and down tone— was her status as front runner in the polls. A track of Gallup polls from January through May shows her as the consistent leader in the national Democratic polls, most often registering in the 30-40% range. As the election season wore on, and Clinton began to build on her lead, some stories even began focusing on the “I-word,” (inevitable).

Rudolph Giuliani – front runner facing doubters

There are a number of striking similarities in the campaign dynamic and coverage of the two New York candidates in this race. (Clinton and Giuliani were ticketed to face each other in the 2000 New York Senate race when prostate cancer forced Giuliani out of the campaign.) Like Clinton, the former New York mayor has been his party’s leader in the polls from the start. He has also been the GOP’s top newsmaker (9% of all stories).

And he, too, has received more negative coverage than positive and in much the same proportion as Clinton (37% negative, 28% positive and 35% neutral).

If Clinton has faced questions about her likeability as a general election candidate, Giuliani confronts a continuing issue in his quest during the primaries: Is he too socially liberal for the GOP base? Can toughness on terrorism convince conservatives to overlook other disagreements with him?

Giuliani		Coverage
Political Topics Strategy and Polls	53.7 47.5	63.4 50.0
Personal Topics	11.1	17.3
Personal Finances	1.9	0.7
Domestic Policy Abortion	22.2 19.1	7.2 2.9
Foreign Policy	7.4	7.5
War on Terror	6.2	0.9
Public Record	3.1	1.4
Electorate	1.9	1.1
Miscellaneous	0.6	2.0

In the early phases of the campaign, these issues made up a notable portion of Giuliani coverage. All told, his ideas on domestic policy made up 22% of Giuliani stories, far more than the 7% norm. Almost all of that (19%) was about Giuliani’s perceived biggest electoral weakness in the primaries, abortion.

The tone of coverage of Giuliani fluctuated, but the only month in which he actually enjoyed more positive than negative press (37% to 24%) was in February, when he officially announced his candidacy. After that, the tone steadily dropped, picking up

Topics of Rudy Giuliani’s Coverage

Percent of All Stories

All

again in May. Throughout the five months, however, the tone remained more negative

than not.

But the negative tilt to the coverage differed by medium. Front-page coverage of Giuliani in the newspapers studied tended to be more negative than anything else (six out of 12), thanks in part to rough coverage from his hometown paper, The New York Times. The same was true on network evening newscasts (six negative pieces out of 14).

There was better news for Giuliani on the Fox News Channel where positive stories dominated over negative. (Eight out of 18 were positive, while three were negative). But perhaps indicative of the conservative qualms about Giuliani’s more socially moderate views, on conservative talk radio, nine out of the 16 segments were negative, while just four were positive.

One reason why a non-announced candidate like Fred Thompson attracted significant media attention in the first five months—and why there was also flurry of press interest in a Newt Gingrich candidacy—was a dynamic that emerged in the early phases of this campaign. Many Republicans were uneasy with their choices. Thus, the idea of Giuliani as a shaky front runner has been a consistent story line.

Barack Obama—The Rising and Fading Star?

Barack Obama made his introductory mark on the national political scene with a compelling and original speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Chicago. When he arrived in Washington as a freshman Senator from Illinois, speculation about his running for President struck some observers as an act of impudence and others as an echo of John Kennedy, another young Senator who jumped over his elders to run for the White House. And when he began making trips to Iowa and New Hampshire, journalists marveled at a charisma that some said echoed not only John Kennedy, but even more so his brother Robert.

That star appeal was evident in the press coverage of Obama in the first five months of the year. With 47% of the stories clearly offering a favorable tone about his candidacy, he was the media darling among major contenders. In all, he was three times more likely to get positive coverage as negative, and nearly twice as likely to get favorable stories as Clinton was. He was the only prominent candidate among the Democrats whose coverage was more favorable than neutral (38%).

The treatment, if one looks more closely, was even more favorable in some of the most important media of all. Obama enjoyed particularly favorable coverage from three media in particular—newspapers (70% positive stories), network morning news (58% positive), and network evening news (55%). Only in conservative talk radio was the coverage of Obama more negative than not.

For all that good news, however, the trajectory over time of Obama coverage suggests a more complicated story. While the coverage tilted 30 points toward the positive in January and February, it jumped to a 70-point positive differential in April. But by May, there were signs of trouble. The coverage had become far more neutral, with positive stories and negative more equally divided.

Do the data offer any empirical hint as to why he enjoyed the largest percentage of clearly promising stories? One reason may be that twice as many stories as the norm (15% vs. 7% overall) were about fundraising, an area where Obama exceeded expectations. Fewer stories than the norm (38% vs. 50% generally) were about his standing in the race—where reporters might have focused on his inability to gain much ground on Clinton. The level of coverage of Obama’s personal biography—one of the