If there was ever any doubt as to the utter lack of fairness of the News Media in covering this campaign, it is about to be swept away. On Barack Obama's upcoming overseas trip, he will be followed around by all three major news network anchors at some point on the trip! Get ready for wall-to-wall nonstop coverage of Obama's every move and prounouncement, in stark contrast to the media's ho-hum coverage of John McCain's overseas trips.

Senator John McCain's trip to Iraq last spring was a low-key affair: With his ordinary retinue of reporters following him abroad, the NBC News anchor Brian Williams reported on his arrival in Baghdad from New York, with just two sentences tacked onto the "in other political news" portion of his newscast.

But when Obama heads for Iraq and other locations overseas this summer, Williams is planning to catch up with him in person, as are the other two evening news anchors, Charles Gibson of ABC and Katie Couric of CBS, who, like Williams, are far along in discussions to interview Obama on successive nights.

And while the anchors are jockeying for interviews with Obama at stops along his route, the regulars on the Obama campaign plane will have new seat mates: star political reporters from the major newspapers and magazines who are flocking to catch Obama's first overseas trip since becoming the presumptive nominee of his party.

The extraordinary coverage of Obama's trip reflects how the candidate remains an object of fascination in the news media, a built-in feature of being the first African-American presidential nominee for a major political party and a relative newcomer to the national stage.

But the coverage also feeds into concerns in McCain's campaign, and among Republicans in general, that the media is imbalanced in their coverage of the candidates, just as aides to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton felt during the primary season.

It is unproductive to spend it worrying about the way Obama is covered," said Jill Hazelbaker, a spokeswoman for McCain. "That being said, it certainly hasn't escaped us that the three network newscasts will originate from stops on Obama's trip next week."

News executives say they generally devote the same resources to the candidates. But they do not dispute that Obama has received more coverage this year, not only because of the historic nature of his campaign and his newness to the political scene relative to McCain, but also because of the protracted nature of his primary battle with Clinton, which was at a peak when McCain last went to Iraq.

The imbalance has appeared in various analyses of the news coverage. The Tyndall Report, a news coverage monitoring service that has the broadcast networks as clients, reports that three newscasts by the traditional networks — which have a combined audience of more than 20 million people — spent 114 minutes covering Obama since June; they spent 48 minutes covering McCain.

The reality is what it is. We cannot change the fact that the press as a whole is virtually totally in the tank for Barack Obama. From now to November, they will do all they can to assist, protect, and advance his candidacy. At the same time, the will seek to ignore John McCain as much as possible. But John McCain is not a quitter, and the American people just may see through the false reality Obama and his accomplices in the media are trying to create. We have to hope so.