NY Times Public Editor To His Own Paper: Please Give More Coverage To John Edwards
November 19, 2007 -- 3:08 PM EST // //

Since the beginning of this campaign it's been this blog's distinct impression that The New York Times has been short-shrifting John Edwards -- both in its coverage early on of Edwards' anti-poverty efforts and more recently in its devotion of far more ink to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. This frustration is shared -- and often voiced -- by Edwards supporters, too.

Well, now the Times public editor, Clark Hoyt, has taken a detailed look at the paper's political coverage, and it appears that he agrees with part of this critique. In this week's column, which generally praises Times political coverage, he faults the paper for not giving Edwards the space his campaign deserves:

I think the call is easier on the candidates at the very back of the pack, including some whose only campaign activity is to appear in the debates. But an unusually large number of serious candidates bunched somewhere behind the front-runners are not getting major attention in The Times.

I’ll cite just one case where I don’t think The Times is paying enough attention.

In Iowa, which launched a little-known Jimmy Carter to his party’s nomination in 1976, John Edwards is close behind Clinton in the most recent Des Moines Register poll, yet The Times has given him comparatively scant coverage. Clinton and Obama have been profiled twice each on the front page since Labor Day, but Edwards not at all this year. Throughout the paper, The Times has published 47 articles about Clinton since Labor Day, only 18 about Edwards.

To be fair, it's not hard to understand why Hillary and Obama -- both mega-wattage political stars whose candidacies are potentially history-making -- tend to suck up so much of the attention. Still, those numbers Hoyt shares suggest a sharp disparity in the coverage, particularly given that Edwards is in a virtual dead-heat with the two front-runners in Iowa.

To his credit, Richard Stevenson, the editor in charge of the paper's coverage of the race, acknowledges that finding the resources to coverage of all the candidates is "frustrating," adding that it's something the paper wrestles with constantly. But he justifies the lack of Edwards coverage as follows: "I don’t track our coverage by quantity; in a qualitative sense, we’ve covered him pretty thoroughly, and there is more to come."

Right, right -- but quantity does matter. And the quantity of coverage given by the paper to Edwards has given readers the distinct impression that this is a two-person race, when it isn't. Luckily, there's still time to take a step towards getting this right, but that time is fast running out.

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