The groups that make up this block are the Christian Right; the three million members of the National Rifle Association; the Catholic Pro-Life movement; the anti-immigrant movement in California; the US armed forces; and the eccentric hippy Right. Together they amount to tens of millions of American voters, and many of them know more about the darker side of Bill and Hillary Clinton than the supposed cognoscenti in the lawyer-liberal ghetto of Washington DC.

Five years ago they would have had trouble keeping abreast of events, but now the computer Internet serves as a clearing house of "unauthorised" newspaper articles and obscure newsletters from all over the country. The material gets picked up by radio talk show hosts - a Right-wing stronghold - and is then disseminated over the airwaves to huge numbers of people. And it counts.

But the majority of the American people have almost no exposure to this network. They rely on the mainstream press to keep them informed, a highly filtered source of news. We know from the results of a recent survey that 89 per cent of the Washington press corps voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, and only 2 per cent describe themselves as conservative.

'They have not printed a word about astonishing allegations in sworn testimony from a court case in Little Rock'

The New York Times and the Washington Post, the two newspapers that set the political agenda for most of the American media, have systematically ignored critical stories. They have not reported - in a serious fashion - that the lead prosecutor investigating the death of White House aide Vincent Foster, associate independent counsel Miquel Rodriguez, resigned in disgust last year after being prevented from pursuing serious evidence of foul play.

They have not printed a word about astonishing allegations in sworn testimony from a court case in Little Rock suggesting that Bill Clinton had ties to a drug trafficking organisation when he was Governor of Arkansas. They have never reported on Jerry Parks, the head of security for the Clinton-Gore campaign, who was murdered in Little Rock in 1993. And although they have touched on the Troopergate scandal, they have never given readers an inkling of the sheer scale and character of Bill Clinton's philandering exploits. "Marital infidelity", as they delicately put it, is hardly the same thing as compulsive one-night-stands with scores of women.

In essence, the typical American reader has been given a sanitised version of Bill Clinton, creating the anomaly where people in Europe probably have a clearer picture of the real man. It is hard to see this continuing for ever. The truth has a habit of getting out, especially during protracted and nasty election campaigns.

As the Whitewater investigation reaches fever pitch this summer, Americans are going to learn a great deal more about the past life of William Jefferson Clinton.

This report appeared in the last edition of The Sunday Telegraph