By April Yee 

CHICAGO—Before democratic nominee Barack Obama spoke to hundreds of minority journalists on Sunday, two Dallas Morning News reporters made a private bet.

Holly Yan wagered 40 percent of the audience at the UNITY: Journalists of Color Inc. convention would stand to applaud Obama, though most of the 2,000 there represented media organizations that promise objective campaign coverage. Political reporter Gromer Matthew Jeffers was more cynical, putting a sandwich at stake with his 70 percent bet. As Obama met backstage with the leaders of the minority journalism associations, Jeffers and the audience waited, hushed.

Out came Obama, who with one sauntering step into the theater handed victory to Jeffers. Most in the audience (which also included civilian supporters, event sponsors and Obama's friends and family) stood and clapped. And after fielding journalists' questions—many of them critical, such as The Miami Herald's Leonard Pitts Jr. on whether Obama had gone "too far" in refuting rumors he was a Muslim—Obama strolled off with another standing ovation. Audience members rushed to the rope separating the political rock star from the journalists.

Watching from afar, Yan found the enthusiasm of some of the attendees "grossly inappropriate." The decision to clap or not to clap was not merely fodder for Miss Manners. Many journalists there wondered: What kind of reception would have had John McCain? (He had also been invited to speak.) The question of objectively covering a candidate of such historial proportions has plagued reporters of this election, to the point that 49 percent of Americans polled by Rasmussen Reports now believe the press was on Obama's side. But minority journalists face additional questions on whether they can objectively cover the man who could become the first minority president--questions that, some point out, were rarely asked of women covering Hillary Clinton, or Catholics covering Kennedy.

"That mindset needs to change," said Ernest Suggs, a reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a vice president of the National Association of Black Journalists. "It is offensive that because we have the same color or the same agenda, our journalistic ethics and responsibilities go out the window."

At the UNITY convention, some journalists' compared the apparent enthusiasm of their colleagues to the coziness at the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner, where the president is invited and often poked fun at. The relationship between the head of state and the press, viewed only on that night, could also be interpreted as positive, even if coverage is not.

Les Payne, a Pulitzer winner at Newsday who is black, said black journalists could cover Obama not just fairly, but also critically. "The job of the black journalist in covering Barack Obama isn't to protect Barack Obama," he said. "We have to assume then that we are not in his pocket, that we are not beholden to him, that we are not in his swoon."