New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt and TNR’s volunteer flack for Barack Obama, Noam Scheiber, have weighed in with their takes on whether the media has gone easy on Obama and whether the media is getting tougher now.

Hoyt limits his analysis to the NYT’s coverage of Obama, concluding that the paper “has not been systematically biased in its news coverage, even if it has occasionally given ammunition to those who claim otherwise.”  His lead point is this:

Since January 2007, The Times has published more major articles about Obama’s background and record than about Clinton’s, 14 to 12. While most of the pieces about both candidates are so nuanced they defy description as positive or negative, several about Obama raised pointed questions about his credibility or political courage. The Times has yet to examine one of the most important parts of Clinton’s record, her seven years in the Senate.

While that last nugget is interesting (and should embarrass the NYT), Hoyt does not explain the selection of the timeframe going back to January 2007.  It is a timeframe which coincidentally happens to contain a similar number of major articles about Obama and rival Hillary Clinton.  But it is also a timeframe which ignores the reality that most people (as a side to political junkies) probably were not paying much attention to an article on Obama written over a year ago, when few thought him to be a serious contender for the Democratic nomination.

Regarding the timeframe during which people started paying attention to the Democratic campaign , Hoyt found the following:

Since Jan. 1, just before voters started participating in caucuses and primaries, Obama has enjoyed far more positive front-page play than Clinton. He has had 16 articles that could fairly be called positive to seven for her. Clinton has had much more negative front-page play, 12 articles, to seven for Obama.

But all of the disparity can be explained by what was happening in the news…

Assuming Hoyt is judging the pieces fairly, the NYT was about as positive for Obama and considerably more negative for Clinton than the network news broadcasts.  Since Super Tuesday, Obama’s proportion of good press on the nightly news has been 67% positive, while the NYT’s coverage this year was 69% positive.  Clinton has received roughly 50% positive coverage on the nightly news, whereas the NYT this year gave her only 37% positive coverage.  Thus, it is not clear that all of the disparity can be explained by what was happening in the news.

Moreover, Hoyt’s claim presupposes a certain concept of “what was happening in the news”:

Obama won the Iowa caucuses and Clinton came in a disappointing third, she rebounded in New Hampshire, and then, after they split the Super Tuesday voting, he went on to 11 straight primary and caucus victories. There was a shakeup in Clinton’s campaign, her aides were divided about strategy, some Democratic superdelegates were starting to turn away from her, and her campaign spending worried donors.

The various wins and losses were certainly happening in the news, though one might argue that the media over-emphasizes “wins” and “losses” in a campaign where delegates are awarded by proportional representation.  The Clinton campaign shake-up was also pretty clearly a news event.  But campaign staffers generally do not have fights — and donors generally do not worry about campaign spending — at press conferences or out on a street corner.  Rather, they are stories journalists ferret out after having cultivated sources within and without the campaign.  These stories are not “just happening in the news” — journalists are often active participants in making them public.

In contrast, the general consensus (in addition to the study referenced above) seems to be that Obama has not been subject to the same as the level of press scrutiny of other candidates.  One wonders how Hoyt scored Katherine Q. Seelye’s oh-so-neutral take on one such study; she refers to the Clinton camp “practically browbeating reporters” on the subject.

Hoyt does not consider the degree to which the media chose not to press certain angles regarding Obama with the vigor devoted to tales of Clinton camp infighting.  To take but one example, Hoyt does not ask why the media did not start pressing questions about Obama’s relationship with indicted donor Tony Rezko (many of which remain unanswered today) sooner.  Had they done so, would Hoyt have classified the Rezko story as “just happening in the news?”  Obama’s cozy relationship with Chicago Machine politics — which runs directly contrary to the image he presents nationally — is in fact what has been “happening in the news” if you read the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune, where Obama lives.

To TNR’s Noam Scheiber, tough questioning is a problem for Obama, albeit a minor one.  Obama may have had to flounce out of a Texas presser about a week ago, but Scheiber does not see tough questioning of Obama becoming the norm:

In truth, the press hasn’t turned on Obama. There are simply two different press corps covering him, and the crankier one carried the day in San Antonio. In some respects, the split resembles the now-familiar divide in the Democratic electorate between blue-collar voters and affluent liberals. The press’s version of the lunch-pail set includes some of the local Chicago scribes, tabloid and wire-service reporters, cable TV and radio correspondents, and the ever-present “embeds”–the human production studios who race from stop to stop with all manner of equipment strapped to their backs. These are the people charged with chronicling every twist and turn of the campaign. If Obama abruptly cancels an Ohio event to spend the evening in Chicago, it’s the working stiffs who know why. If the campaign claims to have raised no money from lobbyists, and a lobbyist’s check turns up, these are the people who pounce.

The campaign’s white-collar set includes many of the reporters at elite national newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post, newsweeklies like Time and Newsweek, and general-interest publications like The New Yorker; columnists from all of the above; and writers from political magazines like this one. To varying degrees, these people try to break news. But they tend to assume a more analytical posture than their counterparts. They also write at length about themes that sometimes make the lunch-pail set queasy–like personality tics and psychological motivations–as well as internal campaign dynamics and policy deliberations. The elites are stringing together a “larger narrative.” The working stiffs generally live, if not from day to day, then week to week.

Scheiber then proceeds to denigrate the “blue-collar” press as whiny and jealous of the “elite” journos.  He also predict that the Obama charm will ultimately keep the proles from getting too agitated.

Scheiber also suggests that there really is no substance to the stories about Obama’s background and associations quoting an anonymous editor calling them “thin gruel.”  In reality, the Sun-Times will tell you that on the Rezko case alone, Obama has a habit of slow-walking the media on these questions, that there are basic questions Obama has never answered, and new ones continue to arise.

Give Scheiber credit for identifying the sub-groups within the press, though he gets their roles reversed in this case.  It is the local, blue-collar types who are pressing Obama about his relationship with the Machine they know so well, while the elitists break news that can be broken by dialing people in their Beltway Rolodexes.   Hoyt misses the distinction entirely, which is one reason he fails to account for how journalists shape “what is happening in the news” by their actions or inaction.