Two stories given prominence last week show the scale of the debasement of media standards in reporting current affairs. One concerned Africa and the other Monica Lewinsky.
The Africa story was about the murder of eight Western tourists in Bwindi National Park in Uganda. The event featured prominently in radio and television news bulletins for days and grabbed prominence in most leading newspapers, including this one.
No other story coming out of Africa in the last year, certainly no story coming from the region of Africa that is afflicted with the violence that consumed the tourists (Uganda, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi and Angola), has got anything like such prominence.
An international war, involving seven countries (the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, Chad, Zimbabwe, Namibia and, until recently, Angola) has been raging in the Congo since last August. Several towns have been bombed, vast areas of the eastern part of the Congo ravaged. Tens of thousands died in the area. The war is in part a spillover from the war of genocide in Rwanda five years ago. In part it is an attempt by a number of countries, notably Zimbabwe, to grab influence and, possibly, economic power in the region.
Since last August thousands of people have been killed also in Rwanda and Burundi (another spillover from the Rwandan genocide, although it has been having its own genocide for decades). The world has been largely oblivious to or uncaring about what has been going on.
In the last year a lot of information has emerged about how the United Nations stood by while the 1994 Rwandan genocide was in full swing and how France may have been complicit in the genocide. By the way, about 800,000 of the 900,000 Tutsis in Rwanda were killed in three months, and it is estimated that about half of the adult Hutu population was involved in the genocide (the Hutu population was about four million).
It was revealed that Kofi Annan, the present UN Secretary-General and then head of UN Peacekeeping Operations, was informed of the plans for the genocide four months before it occurred and did nothing. It has also emerged that after the genocide started on April 6th, 1994, at closed sessions of the UN Security Council the US and British representatives strongly objected to the characterisation of what was going on as genocide. However, most of the time was spent not even in trying to win a ceasefire but on how to get the few hundred UN troops that remained in Rwanda out.
In relation to France, the very close links between the family of the late President Mitterrand of France and the Hutu leadership in Rwanda that organised the genocide have emerged. France fed the regime that had been planning genocide for some years with armaments; Mitterrand's son was a close adviser to the head of that regime.
Now most of these stories got no prominence in the Western media. The recent resumption of the Angolan civil war - over 40 people have been killed in this war in the last few weeks - has got virtually no attention either.
But when eight Western tourists get killed in that very same violence that has led to the massacre of more than a million people in the last five years, all the stops are pulled out.
It is not just that white lives matter more than black lives, it is that black lives don't matter at all. Even the liberal media succumbed. And succumb they did, too, over Monica Lewinsky.
Monica Lewinsky has - or should have - interesting insights to give us about how Kenneth Starr perverted the prosecutorial system in the United States in an ideologically driven campaign against the incumbent President.
It would be interesting to hear her tell how she was effectively kidnapped by Starr's team, refused use of the telephone (when she went to the backroom the phone was removed and when she spoke to her mother a Starr aide held his finger over the cut-off bottom lest she reveal where she was and what was happening to her).
It might also be interesting to hear her tell how she was threatened with up to 27 years in jail if she refused to co-operate with Starr.
But beyond that and beyond prurience she was of no interest at all.
Starr specifically precluded her from talking in television interviews about her treatment by him and his team, so that left just prurience: what she did and didn't do with Bill Clinton in the Oval Office and what she felt about it all.
In so far as what she did with Bill Clinton was of any valid public concern, that was already well known. So there was no conceivable legitimate public affairs interest in Lewinsky. And yet a current affairs heavyweight was dispatched from an exclusive preserve of high-minded public affairs television, Channel 4, to conduct a cringe-inducing pry into entirely private matters. And, worse still (for us), our lavishly funded public-service broadcasting station put it out in its flagship current affairs programme.
No great harm might have been done if this circus had been broadcast on one of the air-head talk programmes, domestic or foreign, that clog the airwaves. But putting this out in the prime current affairs slot represented an abandonment of the values that we have a right to assume should permeate public affairs broadcasting.
I have written above that Monica Lewinsky was of no significance from a public affairs perspective, aside from the use that was made of her by Kenneth Starr and his ideological cheerleaders. But there is a further dimension to the Lewinsky phenomenon that is of valid public affairs concern.
On three occasions that Bill Clinton was under pressure over the Lewinsky entanglement - in February, October and December of last year - he discovered a crisis in Iraq that required American military intervention. On each occasion the "crisis" arose because of the frustration of the work of Unscom. We have since learned that Unscom was largely a CIA tool, as Saddam Hussein had claimed.
On the first two occasions Clinton was hauled back from military intervention, but on the last occasion he was not. Legally unsanctioned air raids were launched on Iraq in the teeth of the opposition of a majority of the UN Security Council and of most Arab states bordering Iraq. And since, bombings have continued (there were raids on Monday and yesterday morning) in defiance of the wishes of a majority on the UN Security Council and of international law.
An investigation of the correlation between the Monica crises and war crimes (threatened or actual) against Iraq is surely more the stuff of public service journalism than questions of whether Monica "tingled" when she first became aware of a frisson between her and the President.