FOUR weeks ago, I criticised The New York Times for overplaying an article on an investment made by Ann Romney’s blind trust. The article was but one installment of the intense campaign coverage scrutinising Mitt Romney as he bids for the Republican presidential nomination.

During this period, we haven’t heard as much from The Times about President Barack Obama’s re-election effort.

There is precedent for the disparity.

The Republican primary fight is a prelude to the general election season. Eight years ago, The Times offered comparably scant campaign coverage of the incumbent, George W Bush, even as it blanketed readers with articles about Senator John Kerry and others competing for the Democratic nomination.

Now, though, the general election season is on, and The Times needs to offer an aggressive look at the president’s record, policy promises and campaign operation to answer the question: Who is the real Barack Obama? Many critics view The Times as constitutionally unable to address the election in an unbiased fashion. Like a lot of America, it basked a bit in the warm glow of Obama’s election in 2008. The company published a book about the country’s first African-American president, Obama: The Historic Journey. The Times also published a lengthy portrait of him in its Times Topics section on NYTimes.com, yet there’s nothing of the kind about George W Bush or his father.

According to a study by the media scholars Stephen J Farnsworth and S Robert Lichter, The Times’ coverage of the president’s first year in office was significantly more favourable than its firstyear coverage of three predecessors who also brought a new party to power in the White House: George W Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan.

Writing for the periodical Politics & Policy, the authors were so struck by the findings that they wondered, ‘Did The Times, perhaps in response to the aggressive efforts by Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal to seize market share, decide to tilt more to the left than it had in the past?’ I strongly doubt that. Based on conversations with Times reporters and editors who cover the campaign and Washington, I think they see themselves as aggressive journalists who don’t play favourites. Still, a strong current of scepticism holds that the paper skews left.

Unfortunately, this is exacerbated by collateral factors for example, political views that creep into nonpolitical coverage.

To illustrate, Faye Farrington, a reader from Hollis, wrote me this year in exasperation over a Sunday magazine article about Downton Abbey, the public television series, in which the writer slipped in a veiled complaint about Mitt Romney’s exploitation of the American tax code.

“The constant insertion of liberal politics into even the most politically irrelevant articles has already caused us to cancel our daily subscription,” Farrington wrote, “leaving only the Sunday delivery as I confess to an addiction to the Sunday crossword.” The warm afterglow of Obama’s election, the collateral effects of liberalminded feature writers these can be overcome by hard-nosed, unbiased political reporting now.

Farnsworth, the media scholar, who is a professor at the University of Mary Washington, suggested to me that ‘more vigilance’ is what The Times needed to keep out bias. He advocated a ‘wider range of sources and greater openness to perspectives that may not be the way the reporter thought of the story at the outset.’ Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Centre at the University of Pennsylvania, is a coauthor of The Obama Victory: How Media, Money, and Message Shaped the 2008 Election. I asked her what she thought The Times should do to wring out bias in its 2012 coverage. Among other things, she said, “Don’t play a sex scandal out when you don’t have any evidence,” a reference to The Times’ controversial 2008 article on John McCain’s relationship with a lobbyist.

Going forward, she said, The Times should examine Obama’s record and campaign promises; monitor campaign messaging for deception; emphasise substantive policy matters over petty rhetorical combat; scrutinise the newly powerful super-PAC groups, and take care not to let polls overdetermine the coverage.

These are the right priorities. To date, The Times has delivered some cleareyed coverage of the administration’s mixed record on the housing crisis, banks, the economy, Afghanistan and other issues. Now is the time to shift to a campaign coverage paradigm that compares promises with execution, sheds light on campaign operations and assesses the president’s promises for a second term.

I asked Richard Stevenson, the political editor overseeing campaign coverage, about these matters, and he offered a detailed email response, noting that ‘we take very seriously our responsibility to report without favouritism.’ He added, “We remind ourselves every day of the need to provide readers voters with as much news, information and context as possible about the candidates, their records, their characters, their positions and the influences on them, including their campaign donors.” On covering Obama’s record, he cited as an example a February 27 article about the president’s decision not to pursue recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles commission on debt reduction, a move the article said had contributed to undercutting ‘a central promise of his 2008 campaign, to rise above the rancour.” Stevenson promised that the Obama campaigns use of his powers of incumbency, along with his ‘political style, character and learning curve,’ will all be targets of Times coverage.

On the question of campaign finance, Stevenson cited several articles that The Times has already done: one on the Obama campaign’s acceptance of money from a questionable source, another on the link between campaign contributions and White House access, and a third on Obama’s decision to use super PACs to support his campaign, reversing an early policy.

On the campaign operations side, he pointed to a March 8 article about the ‘largely secret’ operation in Chicago where data specialists are cooking up ways to rebuild the vaunted support base of four years ago.

I applaud The Times’ stated commitment to doing these kinds of stories.

Readers deserve to know: Who is the real Barack Obama? And The Times needs to show that it can address the question in a hard-nosed, unbiased way.