The NYTimes’ Jacques Steinberg reports on the reporters covering the campaigns of Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Steinberg asks, have journalists “been going easier on Mr. Obama than his opponent…?”
NBC’s Lee Cowan, who covers Obama, tells Steinberg, “Even in the conversations we have as colleagues, there is a sense of trying especially hard not to drink the Kool-Aid…It’s so rapturous, everything around him. All these huge rallies.”
Steinberg writes about how the Clinton campaign’s tactic of going after the press. “[T]he Clinton campaign, which only a few weeks ago released a letter signed by Mrs. Clinton calling on MSNBC to fire a reporter who had made an off-color reference to her daughter, Chelsea, provided a letter to The Huffington Post this week taking issue with The Times. The letter, signed by 503 staff members and volunteers, disputed the central point in an article on Sunday’s front page: that the campaign was rapidly losing hope.”
“Part of it is her campaign’s fault,” NBC’s Andrea Mitchell tells Steinberg, “They started with this notion of inevitability. And they were very arrogant.”