The erasure of revolt.

• Author: Douglas, Susan
• Position: Media coverage of demonstrations overshadowed by coverage of O.J. Simpson double murder trial - Column

OK kids, here's your monthly civics quiz. Who's got better hair, Kato Kaelin or Heather Locklear? Now choose one. Kato is: a) a good friend, or b) a bad friend to O.J. And the final brain teaser. As a witness, Mark Fuhrman was: a) a winner, or b) a loser. Not sure about the correct answers? Not to worry. According to The New York Times, CNN alone has hired approximately 500 legal analysts to help make sense of it all. They even give daily grades to the prosecution, the defense, and, of course, the witnesses. I.F. Stone and Edward R. Murrow must be spinning.

I have virtually nothing in common with Rush Limbaugh, but last summer, when he adopted as his show's daily motto, No O.J., NONE OF THE TIME, it wasn't just shrewd marketing, it was smart politics. While the electronic news media drooLed over every half-baked leak and rumor, Rush and his listeners were beating the drums about welfare reform and a balanced budget. And look where we are now.

Some networks sought to resist making the trial the lead story night after night, but in the same week that the House passed welfare "reform," the Senate approved the line-item veto, the CIA was exposed, yet again, for the murderous organization it is, and Governor George Pataki of New York decided to allocate more sidewalk space as low-cost housing for the mentally ill, what we seemed to get was all O.J., all of the time. The only story that rivaled O.J. was the Japanese subway/sarin disaster, which had a certain, smug, "Ha, you think we're so violent, now you're getting yours" tone to it.

Kato Kaelin's great shocks of moussed hair obscured a rather important emerging story: the growing, increasingly organized rebellion against the Contract on America. The network news channels have either ignored these stories, or given th six seconds of coverage, as they did when Patricia Ireland and other NOW members were arrested in the Capitol rotunda for demonstrating against the cuts in welfare. Demonstrations, it turns out, are no longer newsworthy.

In one of my favorite passages from Marty Lee and Norm Solomon's Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media, they ask us to imagine a news broadcast sponsored not by AT&T and GE but instead by the American Federation of Teachers, the United Mine Workers, and Greenpeace, among others. Maybe a lot of what got ignored or buried in March would be headline news.

Receiving only the most cursory coverage, if covered at all, were a series of stories cast...