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After six weeks on the stump in Pennsylvania, the two surviving Democratic Presidential candidates put in their last day before Tuesday's primary election. CBS (12 min v ABC 7, NBC 5) offered the most comprehensive coverage, supplementing updates from the campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton with demographic vignettes of key sectors of the Keystone State: Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, plus working class Scranton and the college towns of the Lehigh Valley. NBC led with Pennsylvania, too, as the Story of the Day occupied 38% (24 min out of 62) of the three-network newshole. Yet ABC, whose debate last Wednesday in Philadelphia made such waves, did not rate the primary as worthy of its lead. Instead, on a day when Big Pharma's Pfizer paid for Lyrica to be its sole sponsor, ABC led off its expanded newscast (24 min v CBS 19, NBC 20) with the high price of oil.

Both candidates tried last-ditch publicity gimmicks. Both ABC's Jake Tapper and NBC's Andrea Mitchell played clips from their pre-recorded pitches on USA Network's WWE Raw pro-wrestling. "The last man standing may just be a woman" and "Do you smell what Barack is cooking?" All three networks snared prerecorded sitdowns with the candidates for their morning news programs. Rodham Clinton boasted of her determination to "totally obliterate" Iran on ABC's Good Morning America if Teheran were to launch a nuclear attack on Israel. CBS' Dean Reynolds ran Obama's attempt to play the expectations game on his network's The Early Show: "She has, you know, got to be heavily favored to win."

CBS' Reynolds reckoned that Obama outspent Rodham Clinton by a three-to-one ratio on advertising in the state. NBC's Mitchell put the ratio at two-to-one, yet even after those bills she reckoned Obama has $42m on hand in cash while Rodham Clinton is "still in the red." Mitchell pointed out that Rodham Clinton has a secret weapon: her daughter Chelsea and Ed Rendell, the Governor of Pennsylvania, "spent Friday night on a pub crawl in Philadelphia's gay bars."


Andrew Tyndall 4/22/08 10:30:59 pm

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