TheBigFiveOh.com Blog looked at the differences between MSNBC and FNC during today’s Obama announcement…

And I noticed something weird: the image of Barack Obama on Fox News was significantly worse than his image on MSNBC. While the camera image on MSNBC was steady, well balanced, close-up, and sharp, Fox’s camera image was terrible–the camera was jumping around as if it was being held by hand or there were hurricane-force winds out there; the color contrast was nearly flat and quite washed-out; the point-of-view was very wide, making Obama look smaller and showing the TelePrompTer screens; and it even looked out of focus. It was uncomfortable to watch for more than a few seconds.

Was this done on purpose to unconsciously force viewers to turn off the speech? If so, it didn’t work–at least with me–because I turned over to MSNBC to watch the rest of it. But do networks that definitely lean a certain way politically actually tell their directors to muddy up the pictures or audio to make the person they disagree with look or sound bad?

There was no question that MSNBC covered Barack’s speech like a major national news event, like the State of the Union, and Fox covered it like an ordinary breaking news story; it was also obvious that Chris Matthews was going out of his way to heap praise and promise on Obama, while Chris Wallace’s slant was more anticipatory, as if saying that now Obama has to show us something because he’s in it for real. But I was frankly offended that Fox would actually deliver a less-than clear, crisp camera image just to make a political point.

I missed today’s announcement but if there was a difference in the image quality I seriously doubt it was done for political reasons.

Tom Steinert-Threlkend blogs in Multichannel News about the branding of Maria Bartiromo…

Maria Bartiromo knew the moment she walked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and started reporting live that she would be held to a different standard. That men would talk. That men might flirt. That she would have to hold herself above reproach on the intersection of genders.

If Thomson had booted off Citigroup employees so he could spend the same amount of time talking with Louis Ruykeyser of Wall $treet Week, were he alive today, or Irving R. Levine of NBC News or “madman” Jim Cramer or even the aspiring financial heavyweight Neil Cavuto, there wouldn’t be this uproar.

But Cavuto and Cramer aren’t Bartiromo. She’s today’s preeminent name brand in on-air financial journalism.

And that is what she’s really got to worry about. How she protects and promotes that brand.