Campaign Coverage

In response to "Special Prosecutor Clears Boxer in House Bank Check Scandal," Oct. 10: Interesting how the small article was buried inside--yet the original "scandalous story of blame" was blasted across the front page for days! Considering how the issue is being used against her in the Senate race, doesn't Barbara Boxer deserve to have her name cleared of any criminal wrongdoing on Page A1 as well? DONNA SHEANIN Tarzana

So it's over. Mitt Romney is now on his way to political oblivion. To hear the media tell it, a lukewarm convention, his gaffe accusing President Obama of apologizing to seething Muslim masses and his remarks at a fundraiser in which he impugned nearly half the country as self-pitying victims have done him in. A month ago, he was a candidate with a bulging war chest facing an opponent saddled with a creaky economy. Now he's toast. But not so fast. Here's a prediction. Regardless of what Romney does - even if he continues to stick both feet in his mouth - he is very likely to see his fortunes rise.

Two minor-party candidates and a campaign manager staged a brief protest Wednesday at The Times' plant in Chatsworth against what they said was the newspaper's limited campaign coverage. "We are qualified candidates, and what we do is news," said Glenn Bailey, the Green Party candidate in the 20th State Senate District race. "But we haven't had coverage by The Times at any of our public appearances."

Political junkies will soon have a new place to get their campaign coverage fix. YouTube on Wednesday launched an Elections Hub to provide extensive online campaign coverage. The new channel will feature political reporting and analysis from such established sources as ABC News, Al Jazeera English, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Univision, together with popular online sources Philip DeFranco and BuzzFeed. In a reflection of the Internet's growing importance as a source of news for viewers younger than 30, YouTube's Elections Hub will offer live coverage of the Republican and Democratic national conventions and, for the first time, provide live streaming of the presidential and vice presidential debates.

The media are awash in "he said/she said/we're mum" journalism, "the practice of reporters parroting competing rhetoric instead of measuring it for veracity against known facts." That's the collective judgment of the two editors and five writers who work for CampaignDesk.org, a Columbia University-based website that's providing daily criticism of the media's coverage of the presidential campaign.

"Campaign reporting is very narrow," says Nicholas Lemann, a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine. "If you watch Tim Russert interviewing Gore or Bush on TV, he's really good at what he does. He has to operate within an incredibly narrow channel because inside Washington, there's a menu of things deemed to be relevant about Al Gore. The better you are as a journalist, the more you have to stay with this narrow channel.

Thumbing through a scrapbook stuffed with review clips from 1992 gives off a strange, giddy feeling of a year having whizzed by like a train off the tracks. It also gives off something even stranger: The hard, week-by-week evidence that television--be it network, cable, public--is obsessed with anything that doesn't have to be invented, that can be recalled, retold, retranslated. It's why there are rabid fans of "Northern Exposure" and "Mystery!"

Bad week for insider hotshots, great week for snide potshots. Rob Rogers applied himself to the Justice Department hiring scandal. Mike Luckovich slammed Alaska's Ted Stevens from the Senate to the Big House. (How much would a bridge to Alcatraz cost?) And ... wait a minute, is the liberal media conspiracy breaking down? Nate Beeler was just one of many cartoonists to finger a fawning press corps for twisting campaign coverage. Patience, Nate, Obama will stumble soon enough. Word is he's appointing Dick Cheney to head his veep search committee.

It would be imperceptible to all but the most insidery of campaign aficionados, but coverage of the presidential race took on a bit of momentum Monday. That's when Mitt Romney's traveling press corps kicked off “protective pool” coverage of Republican candidate. A routine of campaign coverage for decades, the pools give reporters limited access to candidates even on the days when they have no planned events. The theory is that the press should have maximum access to those who would be president, to witness a simple aside to a voter, contact with a big-money donor or some unforeseen disaster.

Rick Perry really did get an easy ride, Ron Paul really has been ignored and Barack Obama truly can't catch a break. That's a rough summary of the findings of a massive, computer-based study of campaign coverage by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. The center, using a computer program developed by a Harvard University expert on quantitative analysis, analyzed every campaign story published from May 2 though Oct. 9 by about 11,500 news outlets -- essentially every news outlet in the business -- to determine whether each individual statement about a candidate was positive, negative or neutral.

As the 2008 presidential campaign moves into its final, frenzied push, the race has never been more competitive. In this case, the rivals are the broadcast television news divisions and their cable news challengers jockeying to win viewers for their political coverage. The cable channels showed clout during the party conventions, but ABC, CBS and NBC are hoping that their evenhanded style and high-profile exclusives will keep people watching this fall. One sign of the broadcasters' continuing sway: Tonight ABC's "World News" will air the first part of anchor Charles Gibson's interview with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the only one she has granted since becoming the Republican vice presidential nominee.

Bad week for insider hotshots, great week for snide potshots. Rob Rogers applied himself to the Justice Department hiring scandal. Mike Luckovich slammed Alaska's Ted Stevens from the Senate to the Big House. (How much would a bridge to Alcatraz cost?) And ... wait a minute, is the liberal media conspiracy breaking down? Nate Beeler was just one of many cartoonists to finger a fawning press corps for twisting campaign coverage. Patience, Nate, Obama will stumble soon enough. Word is he's appointing Dick Cheney to head his veep search committee.

It's the height of election season, and Pakistani television audiences might expect the airwaves to be crackling with live campaign coverage, argumentative talk shows and sharp-tongued political commentary. Instead, two weeks before this country's most hotly contested parliamentary vote in years, broadcast outlets operate under a stringent code of conduct imposed by President Pervez Musharraf during a six-week period of emergency rule that ended this month.

In the old days, working the news media during a Mexican presidential campaign was a pretty simple affair: The ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party routinely pressured and/or bribed newspapers and radio and television stations to run stories favorable to the government. For the most part, the media complied in this symbiotic arrangement.

Dan Rather may be under attack from bloggers, political conservatives and some of his fellow journalists, but on Saturday the CBS News anchor got an outpouring of support from a public audience that brought tears to his eyes. Two of his prominent peers also jumped to his defense, with NBC News' Tom Brokaw decrying the "kind of political jihad" against Rather and CBS News as "highly outrageous."

The media are awash in "he said/she said/we're mum" journalism, "the practice of reporters parroting competing rhetoric instead of measuring it for veracity against known facts." That's the collective judgment of the two editors and five writers who work for CampaignDesk.org, a Columbia University-based website that's providing daily criticism of the media's coverage of the presidential campaign.