Winning the Media Campaign
Most government books seem to have weak chapters on the media (possibly because the medium is changing so rapidly), but this study migh help you. It is based on Pew Research statistical studies and has a number of great charts which allow you to quickly show your students pictorally what was going on at a given point in time since the national conventions. For example, it shows the just following the collapse of Lehrman Brothers, the positive coverage of Obama went up and then after McCain suspended his campaign, coverage of him actually turned negative. In a sense some of this backs up what political scientists (and here, here and here) say which is that the percentage of public approval for the sitting president and the perception of the economy's strength are what is important a president, not what the campaigns are doing.