A three-way failure.

• Author: Douglas, Susan
• Position: Coverage of the Rwanda civil war - Pundit Watch - Column

While the corpses of small children an babies, lashed to their mothers' bodies, wash up on the shores of Lake Victoria, the commentators of America sit giggling over a White House aide's misuse of a Government helicopter. While China continues to amass an appalling human-rights record, John McLaughlin describes granting it "most favored nation" status as "the most enlightened move Clinton has made." And while Clinton is floating a "welfare reform" proposal straight out of Oliver Twist, the Paula Jones case is put forward as the most important "woman's issue" story of the day.

The focus on so-called private morality, on individual lapses and peccadilloes, on image over substance, and on misadventures inside the Beltway continues unabated in punditland, while various disasters don't even merit a comment. And this isn't just "giving the people what they [allegedly] want"--titillation over analysis, domestic news over foreign. There is a racism here so thorough, so naturalized, and so subtle, that it takes work to recognize it. It is a racism that justifies moral resignation, justifies turning our backs and applauding cruel, heartless policy moves at home and abroad.

The same few weeks that the newspapers described, in stomach-turning detail, the butchery in Rwanda and terrorism in Haiti, the McLaughlin Group, when not devoting two-thirds of its show to Paula Jones or to predicting the outcome of the next elections, was insisting that disclosures in Haldeman's diaries about Nixon's racist, anti-Semitic, paranoiac ravings were of no historical importance.

Over on Inside Washington, the discussion soared to the stratosphere of speculation: What kind of a Supreme Court justice would Stephen Breyer really be? Would Dan Rostenkowski cop a plea? Would Hillary ever run for President? Anyone could discuss these issues, since the correct response, at the time, was "Who knows?" The self-indulgent, white-centered frivolity of these topics is revolting in the face of those photos from Lake Victoria.

Most of us know little or nothing about Rwanda; I'm sure the pundits are no exception. And with Clinton dismissing the crisis as outside the American national interest, why bother? It took more than a month for the news media to stop dismissing the conflict as tribal warfare and to acknowledge that there were actually political and economic reasons for the bloodshed. But with the sensationalized obsession with the carnage--and there is hideous carnage--without...