Obama's ex-pastor dominated primary coverage

Superdelegate role came 2d, survey says

The story of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright received four times more coverage than any other theme or event, a survey said. (Paul Sancya/Associate press/file)

In effectively clinching the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama survived late firestorms of news coverage about his relationship with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, which was by far the dominant media story of the entire campaign, according to an independent research organization.

The story of Wright and his race-based rants against United States policies surfaced in March and received four times more coverage than any other theme or event throughout the campaign, according to data compiled by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an arm of the Pew Research Center in Washington. The issue undercut Obama with working-class white voters in the later primaries, most analysts have said.

Over the last five months of the campaign through June 1, Obama received significantly more news coverage than the other candidates. He was a major figure in 63.5 percent of campaign stories, compared with 54 percent for his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, who started the contest last year as the odds-on favorite. Both Democrats received more than double the coverage accorded presumptive Republican nominee John McCain, who was a prime subject in 26 percent of stories, the survey also found.

No other story line came close to attracting as much coverage as the Wright-Obama association, and most of it was negative. The nonpartisan project monitored and coded about 300 to 400 campaign stories per week in nearly 50 news media outlets, including newspapers, broadcast and cable television, radio, and Internet news sites, tracking campaign stories in which the candidates received at least 25 percent of the print space or broadcast time.

"The Rev. Wright story had legs and continued to be a significant story for weeks at a time and for two weeks almost eclipsed everything else being talked about in the campaign," said Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. "It certainly played into the narrative at that point that [Obama] was having trouble with these [working-class white] voters and that doubts about him and his background, alliances, and influences appeared to manifest themselves in results from Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia, and a series of places."

"One thing that is inescapable is that nothing on the Clinton side approached the flap over Obama's relationship with Rev. Wright in terms of intensity," Jurkowitz said.

Excluding the horse race-type coverage of tactics and strategy, the Obama-Wright story accounted for 6.4 percent of the campaign coverage of the media outlets surveyed between Jan. 6 and May 4. The next closest campaign story, at 1.6 percent, was the running story about the role of so-called superdelegates in determining the Democratic nomination, followed at 1.5 percent by Obama's remarks in April at a San Francisco fund-raiser that white working-class and small-town voters were "bitter" and "cling to guns or religion" in frustration.

When video excerpts of past sermons by Wright surfaced in March, 37 percent of the campaign stories that week were about him and his relationship with Obama, a congregant for 20 years at Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago's South Side, the survey found.

In three of the next four weeks, it was the second-ranked story, narrowly trailing the Clinton "sniper fire" blowup in one of those weeks, and it filled the six-week lull in the Democratic calendar between the Mississippi primary on March 11 and the April 22 primary in Pennsylvania.

Within days after Clinton trounced Obama in Pennsylvania, Obama's erstwhile spiritual adviser was again overwhelming the coverage, the subject of 42 percent of campaign stories for the week after appearing on "Bill Moyers Journal" on PBS and, in inflammatory remarks at the National Press Club in Washington, praising Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. At that point, Obama denounced Wright and broke with him.

Jurkowitz said the coverage pattern broke down into several distinct phases. From the Iowa caucuses in early January through Super Tuesday on Feb. 5, the day both parties held more than 20 contests, Jurkowitz said, the media narrative for the Democratic race "really is we are in for a long drawn out, very close nominating battle with the victor clearly unknown at this point." During the first five weeks of the year, Obama garnered the most news attention in just one of the weekly counts. Clinton was the chief newsmaker in two weeks, and McCain, as he moved toward wrapping up the GOP nomination relatively early, topped the news in two weeks, the only times he was the leader during the 21 weeks surveyed.

Over the 14 days after Super Tuesday, Obama won 10 consecutive contests, culminating with a big win over Clinton in Wisconsin on Feb. 19, when the tone changed, Jurkowitz observed. "At that point, the media begins to anoint him as the front-runner, though not the inevitable nominee," he said.

A sketch on NBC's "Saturday Night Live" on Feb. 23 lampooned the media for gentle coverage of the new front-runner, and "it did lead to a distinctively harder look at Obama and there was more negative coverage," Jurkowitz said.