News Coverage Changes, and So Does Tone of the Campaign

NEWS COVERAGE CHANGES, AND SO DOES TONE OF THE CAMPAIGN
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Katharine Seelye]
Over the last few days, the tone of the Democratic contest seems to have shifted, with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign more buoyant and Senator Barack Obama’s more defensive. That shift may be traceable in part to the “Saturday Night Live” show on Feb. 23, when, back from the writers’ strike, it mocked the news media for treating Sen Obama more gently than it treated Sen Clinton. Sen Clinton amplified that view later in a debate, and her aides stoked it all week, practically browbeating reporters. Now comes evidence that the publicizing by the Clinton campaign and the news media may have helped flip the coverage as it questioned Sen Obama more aggressively. Sen Obama was the subject of 69 percent of all campaign articles last week, from Feb. 25 to March 2, and Sen Clinton was the subject of 58 percent of articles about the election, according to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/us/politics/05press.html?ref=todayspaper
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* TV Networks Resort to the ‘Crawl’ Instead of Real News Coverage
It’s official: the networks no longer cover news, they slap it onto the bottom edge of their regular programming like Post-it notes. There were crawls and brief updates, but viewers who wanted to immerse themselves in the speculation and suspense -- and Tuesday night was arguably a more critical and dramatic election than Super Tuesday -- were relegated to cable news.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/us/politics/05watch.html?ref=todayspaper

* Back in the Game
The morning after the Democratic primary debate on Feb. 21, while both sides argued over who had come out ahead, there was one clear winner: CNN.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/business/media/05cnn.html?ref=todayspaper