PEJ: Obama Speech Too Complex for Press

Barack Obama's landmark speech on race both dominated and baffled the media last week, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The Illinois senator was a "significant or dominant figure" in 72 percent of last week's campaign coverage, his highest level so far this year. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, receded to the background: She featured prominently in 30 percent of stories, her lowest level of visibility since January.

To hear PEJ tell it, Obama's 37-minute address stretched the press's collective cognitive capacity to its limit:

"[P]erhaps the most intriguing element was watching the media culture try to deal with a speech that was so complex it defied the TV panel debate, the skills of the veteran political writer or the parameters of a 90-second nightly news segment.... [T]he speech was so intricate and challenging, it wasn't clear [the media] knew how to react."

Interest in the speech and the controversy it was meant to addressed pushed the presidential campaign to the top of the news agenda: It generated 39 percent of all stories last week, versus 16 percent for the economy and 5 percent for China.