Overexposure Won't End With Favre Trade

Our long national nightmare isn't over. Brett Favre will get to play football again. But the non-stop coverage of Favre's return to football has only begun. ESPN will need to embed three or four reporters in New York City after the saturation attention his short-lived retirement generated in Green Bay.

This has been a perfect storm of oversaturation.

Favre plots a comeback and has his drama in Green Bay at a time the sports world has ground to a halt:

Football practice is underway for high schools and the colleges while NFL training camps have been running for about a week. Yet so little news comes out of these painful final weeks, as we count down to kickoff. The high schools and college can only talk about how they'll be better this year.

The NFL has the exhibition season, which appears to involve fewer snaps put in with regular starting players each year.

(A note: I once interviewed a key figure with the Carolina Panthers, who when I asked about an exhibition game he stopped me in mid-sentence to "correct" me that we were talking about a preseason game. I'm sorry, if you charge full price for tickets and play your starters for one series, that's an exhibition.)

Major League Baseball is going through August, which means the action is still too far away from the race for playoffs spots to get interesting. Golf's fourth major - the PGA Championship - tees off today at Oakland Hills in Michigan. However, since Tiger Woods is on the shelf, the interest level is way down.

Yeah, I know the Summer Olympics starts this weekend. I think we watch the Olympics, but we don't spend a lot of time talking strategy for team handball or breaking down equestrian events. However, we do all become experts on judging gymnastics every four years.

So in steps Brett Favre to fill the void. If the Packers had managed to trade him to Tampa Bay, I bet the coverage would have only mustered a 7 on the 1-10 scale of ESPN breathless coverage.

Put him on Madison Avenue and I think we'll all have the word Favre tattooed on our foreheads by the end of August.

But it looks like Favre has company, after I saw this headline from Pew Research:

Obama Fatigue - 48% Hearing Too Much About Him

The Pew Research poll finds nearly half of Americans surveyed say they are hearing too much about the certain Democratic presidential nominee. Pew's numbers break down like this among voting blocks:

Not surprisingly, a very large number of Republicans say they have heard too much about Obama lately. But 51% of independents shared this opinion, and as many as a third of Democrats thought so too.

And here's what could be a problem brewing for Obama based on this survey:

By a slight, but statistically significant margin - 22% to 16% - people say that recently they have a less rather than more favorable view of the putative Democratic nominee.

Pew Research keeps a weekly scorecard of weekly coverage of the candidates, as part of their Project for Excellence in Journalism website. Here's what they're reporting now:

Barack Obama was a significant or dominant factor in 81% of the campaign stories compared with 78% for McCain, according to PEJ's Campaign Coverage Index for July 28-Aug. 3.

The virtual dead heat in the race for exposure between the two candidates also marked the first time his weekly coverage had even been within 10 percentage points of Obama's total. Indeed, in the eight weeks since early June when the general election contest began, 79% of the stories have significantly featured Obama, compared with 55% for his Republican rival.

Obama may drop out of view later this month. He will reportedly take a week-long vacation before the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Read more about Pew Research's survey on candidate exposure by clicking here

Read more from the Project for Excellence in Journalism by clicking here