Media <3's Obama

Many times over this campaign McCain has complained about biased media coverage. He has claimed that Obama is treated like a celebrity and gets significantly more coverage. This article seems to agree, stating, "during the first five months of 2007, Obama received by far the most positive coverage of any presidential candidate". Is this because there are just that many more positive things to say about Obama, or might the media be biased? It is easy to see what makes him a more interesting story. Obama is younger, attractive, funny, and happens to be America's first serious African-American candidate. It seems only natural that reporters would spend more time on him.

The article also goes on to say that a lot of the statistics on media coverage just depend on perspective. For example, Hilary Clinton had a higher percentage of "negative" stories about her campaign, but "nearly 20% of the Clinton stories were aired on conservative talk radio" and unsurprisingly "86% of these were negative". The author states that stories about Obama were positive because they dealt mostly with Obama's fundraising and his background, while only "14.5% of the stories dealt with policy or the public record".

So I guess my question is, is it up to journalists to cover each candidate evenly, or it the candidate's responsibility to be news worthy? McCain solved his media problem by adding Sarah Palin to his ticket, although the media coverage of her is not always glowing. Personally I have to say that in my perspective there has been far more positive media coverage about Obama than McCain. I don't know whether this is biased or just reflects the candidate's own strengths and weaknesses, but to be honest I'd rather read about Obama's accomplishments any day.