Senator John McCain's trip to Iraq last spring was a low-key affair: With his ordinary retinue of reporters following him abroad, the NBC News anchor Brian Williams reported on his arrival in Baghdad from New York, with just two sentences tacked onto the "in other political news" portion of his newscast.But when Obama heads for Iraq and other locations overseas this summer, Williams is planning to catch up with him in person, as are the other two evening news anchors, Charles Gibson of ABC and Katie Couric of CBS, who, like Williams, are far along in discussions to interview Obama on successive nights.
And while the anchors are jockeying for interviews with Obama at stops along his route, the regulars on the Obama campaign plane will have new seat mates: star political reporters from the major newspapers and magazines who are flocking to catch Obama's first overseas trip since becoming the presumptive nominee of his party...
The imbalance has appeared in various analyses of the news coverage. The Tyndall Report, a news coverage monitoring service that has the broadcast networks as clients, reports that three newscasts by the traditional networks — which have a combined audience of more than 20 million people — spent 114 minutes covering Obama since June; they spent 48 minutes covering McCain...
The news industry's fascination with Obama has carried over to general-interest magazines, with the candidate landing on considerably more covers in recent months than has McCain. In the last couple of weeks Obama has graced the front of Rolling Stone and, for the second time now, that of Us Weekly (both of which are owned by the company of a prominent Obama supporter, Jann Wenner)...
Ned Martel, the deputy editor of Men's Vogue, said, "He's what is called in the magazine world an 'interest driver.' " The magazine put Obama on its cover in 2006 and has recently dispatched the photographer Annie Liebovitz to produce another spread for an upcoming issue. It did do a feature on McCain in 2006 as well; it did not make the cover...
Read the rest of Jim Rutenberg's story in the International Herald Tribune and see how the MSM explains that this imbalanced coverage is completely appropriate and fair because: 1) Obama is new; 2) Obama is "an object of fascination in the news media"; 3) Obama is an African-American; 4) Obama is an "untested politician"; 5) Obama stories are more financially profitable; and, my favorite, 6) it's actually McCain's fault since his campaign has emphasized Obama's lack of experience.
And you thought it was just another case of liberal media bias.
