Last week, the White House press corps turn to their favorite past time - narcissism - and asked White House press secretary Robert Gibbs to grade the press corps performance over the past 100 days.  “Talk about us, Robert!”  We used to always get a kick out of those types of questions.  Gibbs proclaimed, “An A!”

Then came the punchline.  The Center for Media and Public Affairs yesterday released a study on network news coverage of the first 50 days of the Obama presidency.  The looked at the nightly news shows on NBC, ABC and CBS, as well as Fox News Channel’s Special Report.  So the set-up.  During the first 50 days of Obama’s predecessors the nightly news devoted 15 hours and 2 minutes to President Bill Clinton and 7 hours and 42 minutes to President George W. Bush.  In that same amount of time, there has been 27 hours and 44 minutes of coverage of Obama.  More than five hours more than Clinton and Bush combined.

61% of what you saw on NBC was positive, 58% on ABC and 57% on CBS.  Could this correlate to high approval ratings?  What’s even more amazing is that 73% - yes 73! - of what you read in the New York Times has been positive.  In all they have published 115 front page stories running the equivalent of 28 pages.

So the moral of the story is - of course Gibbs gives the White House press corps an A when they are doing all the work for him!

To be fair though, not every comment has been Chris Matthews’s “tingle up my leg” and George Stephanopoulos being “blown away by President Obama’s grasp of the subject.”  But it’s all definitely worth noting and considering - and then realizing why so many people are turning to cable news and the Internet to balance the perspective they get.