Some readers might ask that after reading The News & Observer's coverage of the Democratic presidential candidate. Stories and pictures about Obama's visit to Fayetteville dominated the front page Thursday and a full page inside the paper. Obama also was on the front page Wednesday in a story about his Philadelphia speech on race relations.

Meanwhile, some readers complained that they couldn't find coverage in The N&O of the controversy over Obama's former pastor in Chicago, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., whose incendiary comments about race and patriotism have made him a star on YouTube. "It only took The N&O a week to report the racist remarks from Barack Obama's pastor," wrote Patrick J. Verdi of Holly Springs. "This is one of the reasons newspaper circulation is declining, because newspapers like yours have an agenda."

Translation: The media fawn over Obama's campaign events but hide the negative news. It's the famous media swoon that Hillary Clinton and "Saturday Night Live" have jousted at.

Let's look first at the Jeremiah Wright case. The story about the preacher's heated rhetoric has been out there for about a year and a half, particularly on talk radio, but it took center stage last weekend when major media focused on it. The Washington Post and The New York Times published reports Saturday, and the cable networks and talk radio flogged the story throughout the weekend.

The N&O ran nothing on Saturday, a paragraph Sunday in an election roundup story and a sidebar inside Monday's paper. After Obama's much-ballyhooed address on race Tuesday, the paper ran an Associated Press story that looked closely at Obama's pastor and his church, Trinity United Church of Christ.

Linda Williams, N&O senior editor, defended the Wright coverage. The N&O's focus is on local news, especially on the front page, she said, and the Wright story had to compete with the Eve Carson tragedy and other breaking local news.

Plus, she said, the early coverage improperly focused on lightning-rod comments without putting them in perspective -- that Wright built a mainstream, even conservative congregation best known for community activism in lower-income Chicago. "I think the story was journalistically flawed in that it had no context," she said. "It was only late in the game that you started to understand who he [Wright] is." The AP story published Wednesday provided that context. On Friday, The N&O ran a McClatchy Newspapers story that took a more critical look at Trinity United.

WILLIAMS ALSO DEFENDED THE DOUBLE-BARREL FRONT-PAGE COVERAGE of Obama on Wednesday and Thursday. The story play was driven by the news, she said. Obama's race speech in Philadelphia was front-page news everywhere in the country, and his appearance in Fayetteville marked the kickoff of the presidential primary campaign in North Carolina.

The coverage treated the event as a big deal. In addition to Obama's speech about Iraq, the package included sidebars from the scene in Fayetteville, reaction from military families, a fact-check on Obama's Iraq policy and questions-and-answers from readers to Obama. "The primary's in North Carolina now, and that's why we structured the stories to what the readers would want to know, as opposed to the political show," Williams said.

The reader question feature was new for The N&O, part of an effort to make the newspaper-reader relationship an interactive one. The N&O solicited questions from readers in advance, then posed three of the questions verbatim to Obama during reporter Rob Christensen's five-minute interview with the candidate. Three lucky readers became virtual N&O reporters, complete with their pictures in the paper.

I have mixed feelings about that. It's great to give readers more ownership of the coverage, and their questions were good ones. But that also meant that Christensen had less time to ask his own questions.

I don't know about you, but in a fly-by interview with the possible next president of the United States I want the questions asked by a 30-year political reporter. Williams disagreed with that.

"Why should the professional journalists be the only people who get to decide what questions are important?" she asked. "I think we're beyond the point where just journalists get to decide what the important questions are and who gets to ask them."

Other conclusions: I think The N&O did miss the boat in not picking up on the Jeremiah Wright controversy sooner. After all, that's what propelled Obama to pause his campaign to make that major address on race -- which some consider to be historic. Underplaying the controversy fed those "agenda" theories out there.

Front-page stories on the speech and Obama's incursion into North Carolina were entirely appropriate, news-driven and, in the case of Fayetteville coverage, well-planned and executed.