Citizen politics was clearly on display in the 2008 presidential primaries. Two dozen states had record high turnout levels, and more than two million Americans donated money to a candidate. The Internet—its social networks, web sites, and bloggers—helped drive the upsurge. As Janette Kenner Muir (“Closing the Gap,” Spring 2008) observes, the communication “gap” is closing. Citizen-based communication is rising up to challenge the influence of the traditional media.

Nevertheless, the old media still generate nearly all the election coverage and retain the capacity to focus our attention. As the journalist Theodore H. White observed: “The power of the press is a primordial one. It determines what people will think and talk about.”

When coverage of the 2008 campaign began in earnest in early 2007, reporters quickly discounted all but a few of the presidential hopefuls. The most puzzling reject was John Edwards. Although he had been the 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee, Edwards received only half as much news coverage in 2007 as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton each received. March was the only month in 2007 when his coverage equaled theirs. And most of that coverage flowed from stories about the recurrence of his wife Elizabeth’s breast cancer.

In the 1970s, the journalist Arthur Hadley coined the term “the invisible primary” to describe the year-long period before the first contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. It is a time when presidential hopefuls jockey for the media coverage that can make or break a campaign. Journalists treated Edwards like a second-tier candidate in 2007, causing his fundraising to falter and his poll numbers to flatten. Within a month of the Iowa caucuses, Edwards quit the race.

Clinton and Obama both hogged the media spotlight in 2007, but were portrayed very differently. Studies indicate that Obama’s news coverage was the most favorable in recent times, rivaled only by the coverage Jimmy Carter received in early 1976. Obama’s coverage during 2007 was more than 80 percent positive. Virtually every aspect of his candidacy was lauded, including his lack of Washington experience, which was heralded as a virtue. Clinton, on the other hand, received unusually high negative coverage. Roughly half of what was reported about her by the national press in 2007 was unfavorable. Journalists criticized her for everything from her appearance to her ambition.

Press coverage during the invisible primary had a decisive effort on voters’ opinions. Clinton’s “negatives” rose throughout 2007, and her lead in the national polls had all but evaporated by the time of the Iowa caucuses. Moreover, she had high negatives, whereas Obama did not. Obama’s compelling life story, enthralling oratory, and long-standing opposition to the Iraq conflict helped fuel his candidacy. But so did the one-sided news coverage. Perhaps the real surprise in 2008 was that Clinton held on for as long as she did. If women voters had not rallied to give her a surprising victory in New Hampshire, Obama would have won there and gone on to dominate Super Tuesday’s twenty-two primaries, bringing the Democratic race to an end on February 5th.

After Super Tuesday, Obama’s delegate lead was insurmountable, but his news coverage soured. For journalists, controversies rather than substantive policies are the real issues of presidential politics, so they found the Reverend Wright story to be irresistible, just as four years earlier they had obsessed over John Kerry’s war record and George Bush’s stint in the National Guard. The press has a habit of directing voters’ attention toward things that have little to do with the great issues of the day. The emerging Internet-based communication system, as Professor Muir says, offers the promise of something more substantial.