But to some reporters, those attempts at making nice have come late.

“Part of it is her campaign’s fault,” Andrea Mitchell, the longtime NBC political correspondent, said backstage at the MSNBC debate in Cleveland in Tuesday. “They started with this notion of inevitability. And they were very arrogant.”

Image With a cardboard cutout of a police officer standing watch, a member of Senator Barack Obamas traveling press corps rested up on the campaign plane on a flight this week to Dallas. Credit... Damon Winter/The New York Times

It would be difficult to analyze systematically whether the mountain of articles, blog postings and video segments tilts toward one candidate or the other. But the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a research institute that compiles a weekly index of campaign coverage by 48 news outlets, said that by one measure Mr. Obama had outpaced Mrs. Clinton beginning in mid-February  prominent mentions in that coverage.

Some Clinton aides and even reporters pointed this week to articles that could, at least anecdotally and in isolation, be construed as favorable to Mr. Obama. Among those cited were a front-page article in The Times last June that focused on Mr. Obama’s pickup basketball prowess, and another Tuesday on the front of The Washington Post that extolled his oratorical virtues.

Others marshaled clippings indicating that Mr. Obama had been subject to more serious scrutiny than the Clintons would acknowledge. These include articles from Ms. Sweet of The Sun-Times examining Mr. Obama’s flights on corporate jets early in his Senate career and the literary license he took on his first memoir. They also noted articles in the Chicago papers (as well as in The Times, and others) about Mr. Obama’s relationship with Antoin Rezko, a former fund-raiser soon to be tried on federal charges of fraud and influence peddling.

Which is not to say that there is not much more scouring to be done.

“The number of questions that we don’t know the answers to about the relationship between Mr. Rezko and Mr. Obama is staggering,” Howard Wolfson, a top aide to Mrs. Clinton, said on a conference call with reporters on Friday.

Still, others have noted that with the exception of a mention by Mr. Russert in Tuesday’s debate, Mrs. Clinton has largely escaped serious journalistic vetting over matters like when or whether her campaign will release her tax returns or her calendar from her years as first lady, or detail the origins of the $5 million she has contributed to her own campaign.

Jonathan Alter, the veteran Newsweek columnist who traveled with the Obama campaign to Dallas on Wednesday, said that the attempt by the Clinton camp to weigh various stories represented a kind of “silly, even-Steven-itis.”