First the Good News, Hillary

A story was deemed positive or negative only if two-thirds of its statements -- from journalists and those interviewed -- were clearly favorable or unfavorable. More than half of a story had to be about a candidate to be counted toward his or her total.

Forty-nine percent of the stories involved Democratic candidates and 31 percent Republicans, a gap that Rosenstiel attributes in part to the major Democrats' announcing their bids earlier and in part to the novelty of serious female and African American contenders.

Bias is obviously a possibility, Rosenstiel says. But reporters, for the moment, may simply find Clinton and Obama -- who drew as much coverage as all the Republican candidates combined -- more interesting. John Edwards, by contrast, was overshadowed for weeks by his wife, Elizabeth, and her battle with cancer.

For the junkies, the outlet-by-outlet breakdowns are fascinating. Newspapers gave Clinton roughly twice the percentage of favorable stories as other media outlets, while discussions about her on talk radio were an eye-popping 86 percent negative.

Front-page newspaper coverage of Giuliani tended to be negative, "thanks in part to rough coverage from his hometown paper, the New York Times," the report said. On Fox News, Giuliani drew eight positive stories and three negative, with seven rated neutral.

Coverage for Obama was 70 percent positive in newspapers, 58 percent positive on network morning shows and 55 percent positive on evening newscasts. The overall coverage slipped to neutral in May as some of the glow faded from his candidacy.

Surprisingly, the first half-hour of the morning shows carried more campaign stories than the nightly newscasts. "Today" led with 110 stories, followed by "Good Morning America" (81), CBS's "Early Show" (74), "NBC Nightly News" (56), "CBS Evening News" (55) and ABC's "World News" (43).

PBS's "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" covered the campaign far less than the evening newscasts, but gave the lesser-known candidates about as much attention as the front-runners.

Clean Bill of Health

ABC News has found nothing to retract.

After an internal investigation of Alexis Debat, a network consultant who put his name on a series of bogus interviews published in French magazines, the network said last week it had found only four minor errors on stories in which he was involved.

"Mr. Debat was not the sole source for anything ABC News reported," news division President David Westin told his staff in a memo. "Moreover, we confirmed with Mr. Debat's confidential sources that they had given him the information as he'd claimed in contributing to our reports."

Westin said ABC, which fired Debat after discovering a discrepancy in his r¿sum¿, would adopt new procedures for the hiring and on-air identification of consultants.