Scandal Blitz Is Pulling in Children, Survey Says

Even children have been hard-pressed to escape ubiquitous coverage of the investigation surrounding President Clinton’s relationship with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky, according to a phone survey of kids age 8 to 14 conducted by Nickelodeon, the children’s cable TV network.

The national survey of 300 children, which will be featured in a Nickelodeon TV special Monday designed to help parents and their kids discuss and understand the story, found that 60% of children could, on an unaided basis, cite the Clinton/Lewinsky saga as a major news story. Of those, 9 in 10 said they learned of the issue watching television news, with another 48% saying they had read about it in newspapers.

The poll, released Wednesday, was conducted last weekend, before the president’s grand jury testimony, which aired simultaneously on multiple networks Monday morning.

Despite that wholesale coverage, televising the videotape didn’t generate the sort of massive tune-in prompted by some recent events, including the televised address that followed Clinton’s testimony, based on estimates issued by Nielsen Media Research.

Coverage of the videotaped grand jury appearance averaged an in-home television audience of 22.5 million people from 6 a.m. to 11 a.m. PDT on six networks: ABC, CBS, NBC, and all-news cable networks CNN, MSNBC and Fox News Channel.

The Nielsen projection is clearly conservative, given that millions of people watched portions of the testimony at work, college dorms and other public venues--an audience that isn’t regularly measured by the ratings service.

Still, the combined audience remains relatively low compared, for example, with the 1995 verdict in O.J. Simpson’s criminal trial, estimated at the time to have been seen by more than 51 million people. The ratings service also found that nearly 68 million people witnessed Clinton’s four-minute speech on Aug. 17, which aired in prime time within the Eastern and Central time zones.

Other Nielsen data released Tuesday suggest a certain public fatigue with television coverage of the Clinton investigation.

Monday night, for example, the news program “Dateline NBC”--principally devoted to recapping the testimony--finished third among the major networks in its time period, behind both “Monday Night Football” and the premiere of a new CBS dramatic series, “L.A. Doctors.”