Favorable and unfavorable opinions of McCain varied during the election season, but his favorable opinion remained higher than his unfavorable opinion throughout the duration of the election season according to poll averages. McCain's highest ratings was 57.6% favorable and 35.2% unfavorable on July 13. Opinions of the 2008 U.S. presidential election and the candidates varied around the world. Those who expressed an opinion favored McCain's opponent. According to Gallup polls conducted worldwide from May to October 2008, 7% of the people in the 73 countries polled supported McCain, compared to 24% who supported Obama. Most (about 70% of those polled) either had no opinion or offered no opinion at all. An October 29, 2007, study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy found that through the first five months of 2007, McCain had received the most unfavorable media coverage of any of the major 2008 presidential candidates, with 12 percent of the stories having a favorable tone towards him, 48 percent having an unfavorable tone, and with the balance neutral. In terms of amount of coverage, McCain was the subject of 7 percent of all stories, second-most among Republicans and fourth-most overall. McCain's negative coverage mostly included pessimistic "horse race" stories that focused on his campaign's slippage in national polls and fundraising difficulty; it also included his support for the then-unpopular Iraq troop surge. McCain's campaign went through its near-total collapse soon after the window of this study; the press subsequently focused on a "McCain is dead" story line through the summer, which it was slow to change away from. By the time the 2008 primary season began, McCain's media coverage had shifted and he was now viewed as a "comeback" story. In addition, McCain returned to his long-standing practice of granting almost unlimited media access to him on this bus; this as well as the notion that he engages in "straight talk" free of political calculation gave him a positive personal sentiment in the press. Reflecting this feeling, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough joked of the media, "I think every last one of them would move to Massachusetts and marry John McCain if they could." Measurements by the University of Navarra indicated that throughout January 2008, McCain's global media attention surged from being a distant third among Republican candidates to being the equal of Romney and Huckabee. In July 2008, the McCain campaign shifted to a much more restrictive attitude toward the press, virtually ending the former time for open-ended questions.