Earlier this year, the Center for Media and Public Affairs conducted a survey regarding coverage of the Presidential candidates:

Since mid-December, when the presidential candidates turned their full attention to the Iowa caucuses, Sen. Barack Obama has led the race for good press and Sen. Hillary Clinton has lagged the farthest behind. From Dec 16 through Jan 27 five out of six on-air evaluations of Obama (84%) have been favorable, compared to a bare majority (51%) of evaluations of Mrs. Clinton.

But a new study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that during the week of February 25 – March 2, Obama was coming under increasing media scrutiny. It’s an apples-and-oranges affair to compare the two studies, because the PEJ study doesn’t try to quantify positive and negative, but they do make this observation:

With no primary contests to consume press attention, Clinton’s charges of a pro-Obama tilt reverberated in the media echo chamber last week. Obama’s life and record came under a heightened degree of scrutiny, with everything from his legislative career to his ties to Louis Farrakhan to his African attire getting a public airing. Obama was the top campaign newsmaker and a significant or dominant factor in 69% of the stories from Feb. 25-March 2, a period between the Feb 19 Wisconsin primary and the March 4 tests in Texas and Ohio. That was the highest level of coverage for any candidate in 2008. And part of it was news outlets—from Good Morning America to The New York Times—engaged in introspective inquiry aimed at answering this headline atop one Feb. 29 newspaper story: “Are the media giving Obama a free ride?”

While some are drawing the conclusion (as the PEJ summary suggests) that this heightened media scrutiny of Obama is the result of Clinton "going negative," I really have a hard time believing that. If memory serves me correctly the Clinton campaign was widely accused of engaging in "racist" campaign tactics around the time of the South Carolina primary, and Bill was everywhere.

Rather, I think we’re seeing the evidence that the media has decided that Obama is now the presumptive nominee, and having built him up he must be taken down to make the way for St. John McCain (something I wrote about on February 20).

If Hillary during this time has also had a bounce in the polls, I’ll say again that I think it has less to do with anything that she is doing than it does the media rallying around a Republican call-to-arms and continuing their fine tradition of deciding who our next president is going to be.

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