Obama Abroad: We Get the Picture

CBS's Katie Couric repeatedly pressed Obama on why he wouldn't acknowledge the military success of Bush's surge in Iraq. ABC's Charlie Gibson asked about public sentiment that he's inexperienced and challenged him about changing his position on the status of Jerusalem, questioning whether that was a "rookie mistake." NBC's Brian Williams invoked a poll finding that a majority of Americans view him as the riskier choice for president. All three newscasts, whether out of guilt or a sense of fairness, also featured interviews with McCain.

All week, McCain was asked whether the media were favoring Obama. He deflected the question with the mantra: "It is what it is."

The loudly debated charge that news organizations are fawning over the Obama trip -- especially when contrasted with the meager attention paid to McCain's foreign travels -- seeped into the coverage itself.

"This has got to be very frustrating for John McCain . . . that he wants to make his points, he wants to get coverage, and yet everything seems to swarm around Barack Obama," Gibson told viewers. Couric, playing a clip from a McCain video mocking the media for swooning over the Illinois Democrat, asked, "Will the summer of love last?"

There were some dust-ups. Some reporters complained about the lack of a press pool in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the military orchestrated all pictures and public statements (the Obama camp says the schedule was packed and the Pentagon was in charge, although he did squeeze in interviews with CBS's Lara Logan and ABC's Terry Moran). When the campaign pitched a background briefing in Jordan with aides who could not be identified, the correspondents balked, saying only the White House could get away with that.

Still, the tone of the coverage sometimes bordered on gushing, as in this Associated Press dispatch before the appearance in Berlin:

"In this city where John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton all made famous speeches, Obama will find himself stepping into perhaps another iconic moment Thursday as his superstar charisma meets German adoration live in shadows of the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate. He then travels to Paris and London where he can expect to be greeted with similar adulation.

"It's not only Obama's youth, eloquence and energy that have stolen hearts across the Atlantic. . . . Obama has raised expectations of a chance for the nation to redeem itself."

A Rasmussen poll this week found that 49 percent of those surveyed expect the media to favor Obama this fall, while 14 percent expect favoritism toward McCain.

Not everyone is drinking the Kool-Aid. Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass wrote of the coverage: "McCain is now cast as the crabby uncle who visits and shrieks there's no gin in your house," while Obama is "busy fighting off throngs of reporters, a cast of thousands as urgent and impassioned as in those old Hollywood biblical epics."

Ralph Begleiter, a former CNN correspondent who is now journalist in residence at the University of Delaware, says the notion that Obama was making real news -- as opposed to exploiting pretty backdrops -- is "a sham argument. Of course it's a photo op. If he wanted to go to Afghanistan as a senator, he could have done it."