Former Sen. John Edwards got the short end of the stick when it came to media coverage. That's typically been blamed on the fact that in a historic Democratic primary race largely between a black man and a white woman, a white man just didn't seem to have much to offer in terms of newsworthiness. There was no crying, no Reagan-lovin', no jarring name-calling. There were no Kennedy show-downs. And so Edwards didn't even receive 10 percent of total media coverage when he dropped out of the race. (Rudy Giuliani's exit received twice the coverage Edwards' did.)
But another white man has done what Edwards could not and stolen the headlines away from the Democratic leaders -- from across party lines, at that. The candidate who got the most media coverage last week? Sen. John McCain, the Republican frontrunner.
Last week, Salon columnist Joe Conason asked, "Will the press get over its love for McCain?" The answer, apparently, is no. The New York Times' Caucus blog reports that McCain "has surpassed even Senator Barack Obama and Senator Hilary Clinton in the amount of news coverage he has received." Its source is the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which found that last week McCain received 37 percent of all election-related stories. Obama and Clinton were at 34 percent and 32 percent respectively, which left Mitt Romney out in the cold and trailing at 21 percent.
Shares