I've heard a good bit recently from my friends toward the starboard tip of the political spectrum, alerting me to a new study of the media and the 2008 presidential campaign.

The report found that the Democratic candidates for president received more positive coverage from the media than Republicans in the first five months of this year. Thirty five percent of stories about Democrats were positive, compared to 26 percent of stories about Republicans.

That was among all media. The difference was even more pronounced in newspaper coverage -- 59 percent positive for Democrats v. 26 percent for Republicans.

"Seems the bastion of liberalism, Harvard University, concludes that journalism loves Democrats over Republicans," wrote reader Larry Ballas. "All the time you spend defending your N&O about being balanced I guess will have to be re-evaluated."

He was good enough to send along an editorial from the conservative Investors Business Daily entitled "Even Harvard finds the media biased."

That sent me to the report itself, which was conducted by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard and by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, part of the Pew Research Center.

The report did indeed find that positive/negative imbalance in coverage of Democrats and Republicans, but there were some countervailing factors. Most of the positive coverage was about Barack Obama -- recall that his challenge to Hillary Clinton was the buzz of the first half of this year. Stories about Clinton were more negative (38 percent) than positive (27 percent) in that period.

Also, most of the negative coverage on the Republican side went to John McCain, whose campaign took an unexpected slide last spring when campaign-spending reports showed him trailing Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney.

Take away the Obama and McCain stories, the report said, and "the distinction in tone of coverage between the two parties disappears."

However, that doesn't explain the larger discrepancy in newspaper coverage. So I asked two savvy politics watchers for explanations. Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Public Life at UNC-Chapel Hill, said any bias in the coverage stems from the "narratives" that have taken hold in the campaigns and in the press coverage at any given time -- such as Clinton and Obama being seen as the first woman and African-American with a good chance to win. "That has been a stronger narrative than the narrative of the Republican campaign," which features all white men trying to out-elbow each other. Guillory is a former N&O editor.

Michael Munger, chair of the political science department at Duke University, agreed that Obama is a factor. "I think a lot of people are excited about Obama's candidacy, and it may be if the Republicans had somebody like that there would be more positive reports. There really aren't."

But Munger also thought reporter bias might play a part. "A lot of reporters are registered Democrats. When it comes down to talking about people they are excited about, there may be a little bit of a bias, in terms of tone." But he reminded me that the race currently is Democrats versus Democrats and Republicans against Republicans. "When it comes to the (general) election, you might very well expect unbiased coverage from those people," said Munger (who happens to be a Libertarian candidate for governor).

I was interested in how the coverage is playing out in The News & Observer, so I looked back at coverage in October. Using my own horseback (read: biased) judgment of positive versus negative, here's how the stories broke down for major candidates:

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