Obama Gets Taste of Campaign Coverage

NEW YORK -- U.S. Sen. Barack Obama hardly could have anticipated that the first minor media crisis of his presidential bid would involve where he went to school at age 7.

The Illinois Democrat's welcome into the world of modern campaign coverage last week offers lessons for both candidates and reporters on the marathon run until November 2008. And it's undoubtedly a sign of things to come.

Chances are "about 100 percent" that a candidate will be ruined by a story that he or she hasn't anticipated, said ABC News political reporter Jake Tapper.

Stories seemingly trivial or even untrue will appear instantly and reverberate madly through the media. Candidates most skillful in anticipating them and reacting swiftly will have a big advantage.

A magazine article's charge that Obama had attended a radical Islamic school while living in Indonesia as a boy was spread on blogs and, most prominently, on Fox News Channel.

Other news organizations sent reporters who learned the school in Jakarta was public and secular and has long accepted students of all faiths. CNN's Anderson Cooper seemed to relish sticking the knife in a rival. "That's the difference between talking about news and reporting it," he said. "You send a reporter, check the facts and you decide at home."

CNN had time to do that because it wasn't a hard news story, said Sam Feist, the network's political director.

"One of the things that's dangerous about a presidential campaign when it comes to the facts is the echo chamber, where one news organization reports a story and it's not true, and one outlet picks it up, another picks it up and another," Feist said. "Before long the public assumes that it's true even when it's not."

Tapper wrote about the story, with the Obama campaign's denials, on his blog when it first surfaced. But like CNN, it didn't appear on the air at ABC until after a reporter had gone to Jakarta.

Whether the same caution would have held a year later, if the charges had surfaced in the few days between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, is an open question.

"A long and protracted campaign like we're going to see means you're going to have long periods with not much news and news outlets are going to want to fill the void," said Tom Rosenstiel, a former political reporter for the Los Angeles Times and now director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. "In some ways, there are more openings for opposition research, dirty tricks, to get into play."

Back in 1992, when the story first surfaced about Bill Clinton and his alleged affair with Gennifer Flowers, a reporter asked him about it one day and received a response. Yet the story was left off all three network newscasts that evening.