A Rasmussen Reports survey in July found that 49 percent of voters believe most reporters are trying to help Obama. Just 14 percent believed most reporters were trying to help McCain and 24 percent said most reporters tried to be objective.

Obama’s seventh appearance this year on the cover of Time magazine, compared to two for McCain, renewed those charges this week. Read our story on that here.

Many journalists argue that Obama, who would be the first black U.S. president, is simply a bigger story than McCain, who fits the traditional mold of a man running for president.

Andrew Tyndall, whose Tyndall Report monitors news on the three major TV networks, said Obama’s overseas trip in July was “the culmination of the storyline about Obama getting all the media coverage.”

Up to that point, he said, Obama had a 2-to-1 advantage in airtime but there seemed to have been a “self-correcting mechanism” by the media in recent weeks, influenced also by the fact that Obama went on vacation, leaving the field to McCain.

From July 28 to Aug 15, Tyndall said total network coverage of McCain took up 45 minutes compared to 28 minutes for Obama.

“Obama coverage went way off after the hyper-charged cover of his trip and the last three weeks he’s been off the radar screen,” Tyndall said.

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, said analysis of 48 TV, cable, radio, newspapers and Internet outlets showed 50 percent of general election stories were “significantly” about McCain (at least 25 percent about him) while 80 percent were significantly about Obama.

But a report at the end of July by the Center for Media and Public Affairs said that since the primaries ended, on-air evaluations of Obama have been 72 percent negative while McCain’s coverage was 57 percent negative.

Another report this week by the same institution tracked the number of jokes about the candidates told by late night chat show hosts Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and David Letterman. Obama was the subject of 169 jokes to McCain’s 322. 

Obama was the subject of more jokes on Comedy Central, however — 207 to 201 — a trend the report linked to heavy news media coverage, which it said may have spurred greater attention from “fake news” shows on the channel.

It said the most frequent McCain jokes dealt with his age while Obama jokes tended to portray him as “pretentious or the beneficiary of fawning media coverage.”

A sample joke (from Leno): “The only way McCain could get less coverage is if he got a primetime show on NBC.”

PICTURES: REUTERS/ Jason Reed, Rebecca Cook

Under the new policy, the party will no longer take contributions from registered lobbyists or special-interest political action committees. 

Obama talked of the change as he touted his plan to overhaul the health care system during a visit to Bristol, Virginia.

He said pharmaceutical companies, health-maintenance organizations and other interests had too much clout in Washington and were the reason for the failure of past efforts to change the health system.

“If we’re going to make real progress, this time must be different,” he said.

“As the Democratic nominee for president, I’m announcing that going forward, the Democratic National Committee will uphold the same standard. We won’t take another dime from Washington lobbyists or special interest PACs,” Obama said.

“They will not fund my party. They will not run our our White House. They will not drown out the voices of the American people,” he said.

Obama’s visit to the state two days after capturing the Democratic nomination highlighted his hopes of putting the historically Republican-leaning state into play in the general election.

Bristol is a rural town in the southwestern part of the state.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Reuters/Jason Reed (Obama steps out of car)

Hillary

Early this summer, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for president learned that the men’s magazine GQ was working on a story the campaign was sure to hate: an account of infighting in Hillaryland.

So Clinton’s aides pulled a page from the book of Hollywood publicists and offered GQ a stark choice: Kill the piece, or lose access to planned celebrity coverboy Bill Clinton.

Despite internal protests, GQ editor Jim Nelson met the Clinton campaign’s demands, which had been delivered by Bill Clinton’s spokesman, Jay Carson, several sources familiar with the conversations said.

Smith notes that there is nothing new about campaigns providing more access to sympathetic reporters. The difference here, he wrote, is “what sources described as a barely veiled transaction of editorial leverage for access.” And in the case of Joshua Green, the Atlantic Monthly editor who reported the GQ story, the campaign didn’t quite consider him sympathetic based on his past stories.

The Clinton campaign did not reply to our request for comment. Green declined to comment. GQ gave us the statement that it gave Politico, attributed to editor-in-chief Jim Nelson:

I don’t really get into the inner workings of the magazine, but I can tell you yes, we did kill a Hillary piece. We kill pieces all the time for a variety of reasons. Other than that, I don’t have a lot more to add about what’s going or not going into the magazine.

A spokesman for Conde Nast, which publishes GQ, would not comment further, leaving us with one unanswered question: How does an editor-in-chief not get into the inner workings of his magazine?