KINDER'S COMMENTARY: WITH ONLY A COUPLE OF EXCEPTIONS, TV SKIPS SENATE HEARINGS

When news broke last year of Bill Clinton's Asia connection, John Huang, Charlie Yah Lin Trie and Co., it was instantly clear that this was a scandal of staggeringly immense proportions. We are now learning whether the literal sellout of American interests, and possibly national security, for a few shekels of campaign cash will resonate with a public jaded about most politicians.

It's a near-blackout among the major media whose job it is to cover the Senate hearings into this unprecedented scandal. The major networks that covered Iran-Contra hearings wall-to-wall 10 years ago this month, reprising their Watergate coverage of 24 years ago this summer, somehow can't be bothered this time. Nor are major print media doing much better -- the Washington Post, especially, has disgraced itself -- with the remarkable exception of the doughty little Washington Times. (The Washington Times national weekly edition is a quick read, a delightful, indispensable information source and a bargain at only $89 for a two-year subscription. To subscribe, call 1-800-636-3699 or check the web site at www.WashTimes-Weekly.com).

Out of this disgraceful electronic media blackout has emerged one major exception. (Make that two: After the first week, the new Fox network awoke to realize an unfilled market niche and began broadcasting hearing coverage. This they join with excellent commentary from Brit Hume, the former ABC White House correspondent currently heading the Fox Washington bureau. Hume is joined by Fox analyst and syndicated columnist Tony Snow for witty and self-deprecating comments free of the pomposity that marks most punditry.)

Even before Fox, however, there was one notable exception to a TV industry's snoozing through a great story, and he boasts an impeccable Democratic pedigree. His name is Chris Matthews.

Matthews, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, is a former White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter who had joined the staff of the late House Speaker Tip O'Neill during the early 1980s, even as this writer toiled on Capitol Hill for a lowly freshman congressman named Bill Emerson. Even then Matthews, who constantly spins metaphors drawn from the silver screen, stood out for supplying the most colorful material this side of Yogi Berra. And so he does today on a show broadcast every weeknight on CNBC called "Hardball" (6:30 p.m. CDT). The name of Matthews' program reprises the title of a delightful book he wrote some years back on the craft of politics.

Standing out among major TV commentators, Matthews senses the grave issues at stake in a White House awash in a sellout of unprecedented sleaze. Last week, one episode featured the always shrill friend-of-Hillary and Newsweek magazine pundit, Eleanor Clift. The intellectually honest Matthews left Clift sputtering in a rage as he demolished her pathetic, everybody-does-it defense of the Clintons.

For honest, rapid-fire analysis far from the droning and self-congratulatory media echo chamber, check out Matthews on "Hardball."

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.