Wright report stole campaign limelight

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

The story of Wright and his race-based rants against US 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 per cent of campaign stories, compared with 54 per cent for his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, who started the contest last year as the odds-on favourite. Both Democrats received more than double the coverage accorded presumptive Republican nominee John McCain, who was a prime subject in 26 per cent 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 per cent 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 per cent of the campaign coverage of the media outlets surveyed between January 6 and May 4. The next closest campaign story, at 1.6 per cent, was the running story about the role of so-called superdelegates in determining the Democratic nomination.