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Media Commentator Paul JanenschIn the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, who has been roughed up more by the news media - Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama? Media commentator Paul Janensch takes a look at the coverage over the past months and gives us his assessment.

Journalists are viewing both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama with a skeptical eye these days, but until March they treated Obama with kid gloves. Maybe they didn't want to appear racist. An NBC correspondent even admitted on the air that it was hard to remain objective at an Obama rally. Clinton, on the other hand, received mocking coverage for telling audiences about dodging sniper fire in Bosnia when that turned out to be untrue. After the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, straight-news journalists, such as NBC's Tim Russert, declared flatly that Clinton had lost the nomination and wondered why she didn't bow out. She was pounced on by reporters for seeming to play the race card when she said that Obama's support was weakening among working-class white Americans.

As for the coverage of Obama, it turned negative in March with the surfacing of video clips showing. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's former pastor, condemning America as racist. Obama distanced himself from the minister, but his criticism was muted. Then, in an audio recording made at a fund raiser in San Francisco, Obama was heard referring to small town residents as bitter over the economy and clinging to guns or religion. Then the Reverend Mister Wright roared back with a vengeance, tossing off new inflammatory statements for the TV cameras. This time Obama denounced the minister's rhetoric in no uncertain terms, but the damage had been done.

Then in a debate put on by ABC, Obama was subjected to a grilling by moderators Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous: What did you mean small town residents cling to guns and religion? What have you got to say about Jeremiah Wright, they asked. What's your relationship with a certain former bomb-making radical? Why don't you wear a flag pin? Finally, this observation: Obama looks good shooting baskets, but we kept seeing that video clip of him at a bowling alley rolling a gutter ball.

So as the Democratic race enters the home stretch, Clinton is fighting a news media narrative that she has been beaten but won't quit. Obama is fighting a narrative that he is an "elitist." Journalists never did much swooning over Clinton. Do they swoon over Obama? Not any more.

Media commentator Paul Janensch is a former newspaper editor who teaches journalism at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. You can read his column Sunday in the Connecticut Post of Bridgeport.