ABC and Peter Jennings once devoted 18 of his 22 minute newscast to a 20 year old Clinton land deal

http://mediamatters.org/items/200601280002

The February 9, 1994, broadcast of ABC's World News Tonight, minus commercials, clocked in at 22 minutes. Fully 18 of those 22 minutes, according to The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, were about Whitewater. Kurtz explained in a February 11, 1994, Post article:

In a highly unorthodox move, the ABC newscast devoted 18 of its 22 minutes to the Whitewater scandal, a story spectacularly ill-suited to television. "We are going to attempt something ambitious this evening," anchor Peter Jennings announced, "which is to try to explain in one fell swoop the Whitewater jam that Bill and Hillary Clinton seem unable to get themselves out of."


"Most people, and I include myself among them, didn't really understand the Whitewater deal," said Rick Kaplan, who replaced Emily Rooney last month as the newscast's executive producer. "It just didn't make sense to do it as a bunch of four-minute pieces."


"With two minutes here and one minute there you think, 'My eyes glaze over, no one's going to understand this,' " Kaplan said. "I said look, the only way to follow this is to do it all at once."

Media analyst Robert Lichter called it "a very good piece of explanatory journalism" that "tells other journalists this is important and tells the White House that journalists aren't going to ignore the story because of the special counsel's investigation." But in a recent Times Mirror poll, only 13 percent of those surveyed said they were following Whitewater very closely.

That same night, ABC's Nightline devoted its entire broadcast to Whitewater.

Whitewater was a story that, according to Kurtz, the American people weren't following closely. According to the Post, there had been "no credible charge in this case that either the president or Mrs. Clinton did anything wrong." Yet ABC devoted an entire broadcast of Nightline and 18 of 22 minutes of World News Tonight to it -- and that's just one network, one day.

And it can't be emphasized enough: The public simply was not clamoring for more coverage of Whitewater. The New York Times reported on January 16, 1994:

The stuff we're salivating over, doesn't interest the majority of Americans in the least.

Pat Buchanan said - and I agree -- that the people are WILD about her. Logic, information, even proof, won't sway these people.

"On becoming misologic," he said, "in the sense that people become misanthropic. No greater misfortune could happen to anyone than that of developing a dislike for argument. "Misology" and misanthropy arise in just the same way. Misanthropy is induced by believing in somebody quite uncritically. You assume that person is absolutely truthful and sincere and reliable, and a little later you find that she is shoddy and unreliable. Then the same thing happens again. After repeated disappointments at the hands of the very people who might be supposed to be your nearest and most intimate friends, constant irritation finally makes you dislike everybody and suppose that there is no sincerity to be found anywhere. Have you never notice this happening?"


that ole guy, Socrates
from the Phaedo by Plato at 89d