By CQ Staff

New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and some of her supporters have said during the campaign that Illinois Sen. Barack Obama has received far gentler treatment from the press than she has, and two different studies out today give differing perspectives on how strong that case is.

While a Gallup poll conducted May 19-20 finds that while most voters think coverage of Clinton, Obama and Arizona Sen. John McCain is about right, 30 percent said the media has been too hard on Clinton, a significantly higher figure than the other two.

But a joint study by Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center concludes that Obama and Clinton have fared about equally - and that Clinton’s own tactic of alleging differences in their coverage may have been a factor.

Clinton, of course, has raised the soft-on-Obama issue several times, most famously in their Feb. 26 debate in Ohio where she cracked, “If anybody saw ‘Saturday Night Live, maybe we should ask Barack if he’s comfortable and needs another pillow.” At the time, the Project for Excellence in Journalism described it as an effort “to work the refs” - namely, the press.

In its survey, Gallup asked voters about how they regarded coverage of the candidates in a survey and got these answers:

• Clinton: Thirty percent say the media is too hard on her, 21 percent say too easy, and 47 percent say the coverage is about right. Asked just of Clinton supporters, 56 percent say it is too hard.

• Obama: Nineteen percent say the coverage is too hard, 37 percent say too easy and 42 percent say about right. Among Obama supporters alone, a third say coverage is too hard while only 18 percent believe coverage is too hard on Clinton. Thirty eight percent of Obama-ites believe coverage of Clinton is too easy.

• McCain: Thirteen percent say the coverage is too hard, 33 percent say too easy and 50 percent say about right.

Asked about the news media’s overall performance, the top complaints of voters were about bias (24 percent), not being truthful or slanting the facts (20 percent), covering shallow rather than important issues (20 percent) and being too focused on the negative (12 percent).

The Pew-Harvard study tried to get at the question of how each candidate was treated by studying what it called the “master narratives” about the candidates during the primary season. The study evaluated the tone of coverage, on a scale of positive to negative, and filtered out how the candidate was doing in the horse race.

The survey included material from 46 different news outlets and combined that analysis with polling of voter attitudes by Pew during Feb. 8-11 and April 18-21.

The study says that between the beginning of the year and through March after the Texas and Ohio primaries were concluded, the tone of the narratives for Clinton and Obama were about the same, both twice as positive as negative. But shortly after that Ohio debate, the narrative about Obama started to become more skeptical, a trend that gathered some steam from March to May, the study said.

The positive narratives about Obama in the press comprised 69 percent of all the assertions studied compared to 67 percent positive for Clinton. John McCain had a positive percentage of only 43 percent.