One question raised in the wake of Hillary Clinton's come-from-behind win is this: Does the press have a crush on Obama?
But the polls tell only part of the story of why reporters for news organizations like Newsweek, The Washington Post and MSNBC, among others, led their viewers and readers to believe that Mr. Obama was on the verge of an easy victory in New Hampshire.
“I think the press for a variety of reasons has strong favorites in each of these two races,” Mark Halperin, an editor at large for Time magazine, said on “The Charlie Rose Show” on public television Tuesday night, in reference to both the Democratic and Republican primaries. “They strongly favor Senator Obama. They strongly favor John McCain.”
Mr. Halperin marshaled no specific evidence for his charge; and, in a harbinger of the debates that would flare up in newsrooms and blogs on Wednesday, another panelist on Mr. Rose’s program, Albert R. Hunt of Bloomberg News, dismissed Mr. Halperin’s assertions as “an enormous exaggeration.”
Still, reporters who cover a particular campaign face a special challenge that was documented as far back as Timothy Crouse’s chronicle of the 1972 presidential race, “The Boys on the Bus”: Their ability to take in all that is happening may be limited.
At 8 a.m. Wednesday, Joel Achenbach, a reporter for The Washington Post who had been covering Mr. Obama in New Hampshire, posted a mea culpa on the newspaper’s Web site.
“Count me among those who thought Obama was a runaway train, that he’d blow Clinton out of the water,” Mr. Achenbach wrote. “You had to see the crowds! Feel the energy!”
“O.K., so in retrospect a lot of those people were probably college kids on break from Massachusetts or Maryland,” he added. “Still many of us sensed that we were witnessing history, a transition to a new era.”