When Journalism Turns Personal

When Bob Schieffer was growing up in Fort Worth, black people were allowed to visit the city parks and the zoo one day a year. "I did not shake hands with a black person until I was in the U.S. Air Force -- not because I didn't want to, but because they lived on one side of town and I lived on the other side," the CBS newsman says.

As a son of the segregated South, Schieffer depicted Barack Obama's victory Tuesday as "a momentous time in American history. . . . I just thought it was more than an election." And he had plenty of company. On television, on Web sites, in newspapers -- with such headlines as The Washington Post's "Obama Makes History" and the Wall Street Journal's "Obama Sweeps to Historic Victory" -- the media are awash in superlatives.

Some conservatives say news organizations went overboard for ideological reasons. The media cast the choice between Obama and John McCain as "a referendum on the goodness of America," MSNBC commentator Tucker Carlson says. "I just resent the implication that America is a better country if it voted for Barack Obama. . . . That's a slur on people who voted against Obama. I think the press dropped its pretense of objectivity on this campaign a while ago."

Separating the personal from the political is far from easy when an African American wins the White House for the first time in the country's 220-year history. Juan Williams, a National Public Radio commentator, choked up on Fox News Tuesday night.

It was once "unthinkable," he says, that he would even be on television. "When I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, there were no black writers at the New York Times, New York Post or Daily News."

But in the black community, Williams says he "gets beat up because I treat Obama as a politician as opposed to the rock star image. People think you should be a fan"

Roland Martin, a Chicago radio host, teared up on CNN when Obama was projected the winner.

"I said a small prayer," he says. "I began to think of black soldiers returning from war who were lynched," he says. "I thought of hearing the cries of ancestors breaking the chains of slavery. I thought, my God, nearly 400 years of what black folks have endured."

Moments later, "I thought of being able to look my nine nieces and four nephews in the eye and say with absolute certainty, 'Yes, you could be president of the United States.' And I began to cry again."

But it was not just black commentators who seemed to respond emotionally. CNN's David Gergen quoted Martin Luther King. NBC's David Gregory declared that "the ultimate color line has now been crossed." Did they get carried away? As co-host of MSNBC's coverage, Keith Olbermann compared Obama's election to landing a man on the moon. "I think our excitement at the imminent history matched the nation's," Olbermann says, adding that "the tone was appropriate throughout." Even McCain supporters, he says, recognized that "this was a milestone in world history. Turns out the public was in the tank for Obama."

George Stephanopoulos, ABC's chief Washington correspondent, says journalists had to "honor" what Obama had accomplished. "Reporting on and praising an achievement honestly doesn't have to be partisan, and I don't think it was," he says. Had Republican Colin Powell run in 1996 "and become the first African American president, you would have felt the magnitude of the moment in the coverage."

Fox News pounded Obama in recent weeks over his past contacts with onetime terrorist William Ayers, former preacher Jeremiah Wright and the community group ACORN. But anchor Brit Hume told viewers that Obama's winning personality had blunted the criticism.