Is Clinton getting a fair shake?

On the bus ferrying a group of reporters to an appearance by Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., at Ohio State University on Wednesday, Lee Cowan, the NBC reporter assigned to the campaign, was asked the media question of the week: Had journalists been going easier on Obama than his opponent for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.?

"I don't think that it's kind treatment versus unkind treatment," Cowan began, taking issue with the depiction of journalists fawning over Obama in a "Saturday Night Live" skit Feb. 23.

Yet Cowan described several advantages he saw Obama as having over his rival: "He hasn't been around as long, so there isn't as much to pick at," he said. "He plays everything very cool. He's not as much of a lightning rod."

As the two Democratic candidates campaigned before Tuesday's potentially decisive nominating contests, questions over whether reporters were giving each candidate a fair shake were thrust into the center of the campaign.

The night after Clinton reprimanded Tim Russert and Brian Williams during the Cleveland debate for asking her a disproportionate number of "first" questions, she appeared Wednesday in St. Clairsville, Ohio. When someone stood to castigate the news media for being unfair to her, the audience cheered.

Clinton appeared last night on "SNL" and thanked the show for giving her candidacy a boost.

Clinton's campaign got mileage out of the "SNL" sketch from a week ago in which reporters fawned over her rival. Clinton had brought up the sketch during last Tuesday's debate between the two candidates, and the campaign has encouraged supporters and voters to watch it on NBC's Web site.

This weekend's episode opened with a similar sketch recreating Tuesday's debate. It portrayed NBC anchors asking tough questions while serving softballs to Obama.

Then the real Clinton appeared on-screen with an "editorial response."

In a New York Times/CBS News telephone poll conducted Feb. 20-24 and released Tuesday, nearly half of those respondents who described themselves as voters in Democratic primaries or caucuses said the media had been "harder" on Clinton than other candidates. About 1 in 10 suggested the media had been harder on Obama.

It would be difficult to analyze whether the mountain of articles, blog postings and video segments tilts toward one candidate. But the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which compiles a weekly index of campaign coverage by 48 news outlets, said that by one measure Obama had outpaced Clinton beginning in mid-February: prominent mentions.

Some Clinton aides and reporters pointed last week to articles that could be construed as favorable to Obama, such as an article in The New York Times last June that focused on Obama's pickup-basketball prowess, and one Wednesday in The Washington Post that extolled his oratorical virtues.

Others marshaled clippings indicating Obama had been subject to serious scrutiny. These include articles from Lynn Sweet of the Sun-Times examining Obama's flights on corporate jets early in his Senate career and the literary license he took on his first memoir. They also noted articles about Obama's relationship with Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a former fundraiser whose trial on federal charges of fraud and influence peddling is set to start Monday.

Other observers noted Clinton has largely escaped serious vetting over matters such as when, or whether, her campaign will release her tax returns.

Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter said the attempt by the Clinton camp to weigh stories represented a kind of "silly, even-Steven-itis. ... People got it into their head that if you say something good about a candidate, you have to say something bad about him, and if you don't, that's not fair," he said.

Material from The Associated Press was included in this article.