March 6, 2008, 1 a.m. -  Many of my friends in the Washington, D.C. press tell me that the media are running out of money to cover the slug fest between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The reason they are running out of loot is because there is no end in sight to the ongoing primary campaign and the Olympics are coming up this summer.

             "NBC may ask its affiliates to scale back their coverage of the Democratic and Republican conventions and take the networks feed," one source told me. The editors at many "newspapers are concerned about resources" another source said.

            Now since my conversation with my friends in the press, the Republicans, who had just as contentious a race as the Democrats, have concluded the primary election process, with Sen. John McCain emerging as the presidential nominee. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee effectively ended his bid to become president by dropping out this week. Still, neither Obama nor Hillary seems ready to go the way of their colleagues - Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Sen. Christopher Dodd and former Sen. John Edwards.

Clinton this week did hint that she may be willing to entertain sharing a ticket with Obama after winning Texas and Ohio. Of course the question is, Who would be at the top of that ticket?  Obama leads in delegate count and some pundits say mathematically Hillary can’t overtake him.

            Now conventional wisdom would have it that the media, of which I am a part, may actually benefit financially from playing up the duel between Obama, a black male, and Clinton, a white female. But these latest conjectures have nothing to do with racial politics that we saw before the South Carolina primary.

 

            What it is about is Clinton’s claim that the press has failed to scrutinize Obama to the same degree they have scrutinized her. So for the last two weeks the press has been peppering Obama with questions about his long reported ties to alleged Chicago slum landlord and inquiring about a recent and embarrassing free trade memorandum his campaign sent to Canadian officials. 

 

            Now I am not going to perpetuate the impact of these questions, but I will say that there are a lot more questions to be asked of Obama and Clinton as well - but not just when news organizations are running out of money. It is easy for those of us in the press to fall into the "Are we there yet?" mode because the primary campaigns started early and are lasting a long time.  But, if the press starts to rush things along by trying to tilt the race in Clinton's favor just because we want this to be over with already, then we do all Americans a disservice. This election is about getting it right since we got it so wrong with the election of President Bush.

(Robert "Rob" Redding Jr. is the Publisher of the Washington Continent, Redding News Review and author of "Hired Hatred: Why politicians, political parties & the political prejudices they tout are mutually exclusive from good government.")