Coverage of Clinton’s scandals overshadows worthwile issues

By Jon Black

We’ve heard enough about Bill Clinton’s sex life.
Despite daily coverage by television and mainstream news sources, Americans aren’t particularly fired up about whether or not Bill actually slept with Monica, Gennifer, or anyone else that wasn’t his wife. Recent polls have revealed that Clinton’s popularity skyrocketed midway through the television coverage of the Starr investigation.

Why didn’t this suggest to the television news media that we’d had enough of the Clinton scandal? Nearly daily updates of “Monicagate” don’t increase the story’s popularity.

The actual issues of Clinton’s presidency have been overshadowed by the over-enthusiastic coverage of this scandal. A search of news services on the Internet for Bill Clinton resulted in six of the first 20 web pages devoted to foreign relations issues and 14 pages devoted to Bill’s various scandals. Is the most important aspect of our president his sex life? What about covering things Clinton has done in his own country?

Issues Clinton attempts to take a stand on are almost ignored by television news and even some news magazines —  issues like standardized educational testing, AmeriCorp and his Dialogue of Race Relations, which both students and adults would care about.

Instead, the news media puts together stories titled “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad SCANDAL,” by the U.S. News Online and the “Crisis in the Whitehouse,” by ABC.com.

To have an effective democracy, the American public needs to know what is going on in our government. We need to be able to judge for ourselves the effectiveness of our federal and state governments, and we need to know what our lawmakers are doing. While Clinton can’t get reelected in 2000, bills that he supports or rejects will affect us for years.

Unless we know what our President and Congress are doing, how can we, the general public, show our support or opposition to an issue? And how will we know when a bill is being passed that will directly affect us?

Right now, we don’t know what Clinton is doing for Americans, at least not from the morning television news.

Television news needs to help us participate in democracy, not dwell on a scandal that Americans can do very little about.

About The Arrow | Arrow front page