Minding the coverage gap

John McCain rushed Friday from touting electric cars in Warren, Mich., to New York for an evening taping of “Late Night With Conan O’Brien.”

While the Republican chased the late-night buzz, his Democratic rival, Barack Obama, had buzz chasing him -- three network anchors readying their crews to head to the Mideast and Europe for prime-time interviews.

It got me thinking about what the conversation might be like when McCain checks in with blunt, bald-headed Steve Schmidt, the chief strategist charged with keeping his presidential candidate from being upstaged. I’m guessing it might go something like this:

McCain: “Cripes. Are you seeing this stuff, Sgt. Schmidt? That young plebe Obama takes one plane ride over the Big Pond and Brian, Katie and Charlie traipse right after him like a bunch of little kittens!”

Schmidt: “Yeah, chief. Pathetic. Unpatriotic, really -- all this fawning. But we have the new ad going up today. Lots of history on Obama’s lack of history in the war zone. Killer stuff.”

McCain: “Yeah, yeah. But he is getting this network stuff for free! He’s doubled my time on the networks. Rev. Jackson threatens his private parts and that’s news!”

Schmidt: “Senator, not all that airtime is good for him. Remember Rev. Wright, Bittergate?”

McCain: “I go to Mexico and Colombia, talk to my good friends down there, and who do I draw? Correspondents. Nobodies. CBS doesn’t even air a story. I’m buried on page 17 of every newspaper in America, right next to the haberdashery ads.”

Schmidt: “Haberdashery? Uh, never mind. I got one booker telling me they’ll deliver their anchor if we do Hanoi. But it’s got to be before August. That’s when everybody’s headed for the Vineyard. And you’ve got to get personal, recapture your darkest hour, all that.”

McCain: “Sheesh, this is my darkest hour. Flailing around, while this upstart corners all the big guns, the force multipliers. Now I know how Johnnie Ray felt when Elvis came along.”

Schmidt: “Johnnie who?”

McCain: “Never mind. I’ll do Hanoi. I’ll go back to my cell. But no dim lights. No hocus pocus. And tell Couric, or whoever, I’m not gonna cry.”

While McCain strained for his moment in the sun, Obama threatened to blot it out entirely with his big road trip. That conjured up quite a different image of the conversation back at Obama headquarters in Chicago.

David Plouffe, campaign manager: “Couric and Gibson are set for the Mideast. We pick up B. Will Thursday in Berlin.”

David Axelrod, chief strategist: “Should be quite a week. B. Will?”

Plouffe: “Brian Williams. NBC thinks the European reception is going to be the story of the week.”

Axelrod: “Right. But better to go small. We want respect and admiration, not swooning. That would be way too Euro. We don’t want to win Berlin and lose Allentown.”

Back at the Los Angeles Times, we’re also awaiting the unfolding of Obama’s road show with great interest. Who wouldn’t be curious about how Obama relates both to soldiers who are fighting the war he opposes and to Europeans who’ve made it clear they’ve had enough of George Bush.

The presence of three anchors has injected an overdose of showbiz fizz into what really is an important, but not an earth-shattering, moment. That just extenuates an ongoing problem.

Since the general election campaign began in early June, Obama has been on the network newscasts a total of 114 minutes, compared with McCain’s 48 minutes. For the year, Obama has received 389 minutes of network coverage, compared with 203 for McCain, according to Andrew Tyndall of tyndallreport.com.

The media’s fascination with Obama is not a complete surprise. He is less known. He’s made history as the first African American nominee of a major political party. His protracted battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton provided weeks of riveting psychodrama. And opinion surveys show that the public remains enthralled with the man and his candidacy.

(In 2000, a less dramatic network coverage gap favored Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, who got 338 minutes of airtime, compared with 296 minutes for Vice President Al Gore.)

That helps explain, but is not enough to excuse, the massive network coverage gap that has opened between Obama and McCain.

While the Arizona senator is drawing news reports at about the level of past nominees, Obama is a “phenomenon,” unlike anything Tyndall has seen in two decades of charting elections.

Not all of the additional attention on Obama is positive, noted another analysis, this one by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Initial gushing has given way to reports about Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., and the candidate’s comments on “bitter” economically distressed voters. More recently, he’s had to grapple with claims of “flip-flopping” as he has shifted policy positions.

In attempts to assess a monolithic “media,” critics have also glossed over other tough hits that Obama has taken, including, in this paper, an account of his comfort operating in Chicago machine politics and a story exploring how his policy proposals might bust the budget.

But by sending their biggest stars across the globe to interview Obama, ABC, CBS and NBC have reinforced the notion that the Democrat is getting an easy ride. It’s time for a mid-course correction, which should include more airtime for McCain, less for Obama, or both.

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james.rainey@latimes.com