JACK KEVORKIAN will soon be out of jail on parole: Let the media races begin.

Who will be the first to get the "exclusive" interview of Dr. Death? Will it be Katie Couric, hoping to score her first coup with the CBS Evening News? What about Oprah? She's the undisputed queen of television. The smart money should probably be on Barbara Walters. Not only could she offer Kevorkian an earnest interview on ABC's 20/20, but also a bonus appearance on the syndicated gab fest The View.

Whichever media king or queen scores the big get, the one thing we will almost certainly not see in the media's reporting will be the truth about Kevorkian's career as a suicide facilitator and euthanasia advocate. Nor will we be told much about the ultimate goal Kevorkian sought to achieve through his nearly 10-year, law-defying campaign of assisted suicide.

KEVORKIAN IS ALMOST ALWAYS DESCRIBED in the media as a retired doctor who helped terminally ill people commit suicide. The December 13, 2006 Associated Press report about Kevorkian's pending parole, by Kathy Barks Hoffman, is typical of the genre, describing him as America's most vocal "advocate of assisted suicide for the terminally ill."

But that isn't completely true: Kevorkian does not believe that assisted suicide should be narrowly applied to the dying. This fact is easily discernible from his remarks, his writings, and his actions.

For example, in 1992, writing in the Journal of Forensic Psychiatry, Kevorkian proposed establishing a series of euthanasia clinics, which he called "obitoria." These euthanasia

He had gone even further a year earlier in his 1991 book Prescription Medicide, in which he urged the creation of a category of "optional assisted suicide" for people who want to die. Those qualifying for mercy killing under this category would include terminally ill people, as well as disabled people with "crippling deformities," those suffering from "intense anxiety or psychic torture," and those who seek suicide in pursuit of "religious or philosophical tenets or inflexible personal convictions."

Kevorkian showed a special interest in helping to kill disabled people. In an interview on the Charles Grodin Show, he labeled people with serious disabilities who were not in despair to be "certifiably pathological" and urged that assisted suicide be made available to the disabled as "a standard medical service."

This wasn't just talk. Kevorkian put his suicide machines to work terminating the lives of scores of disabled people. Indeed, about 70 percent of the nearly 130 people who died in Kevorkian's rusty van or other venues were not terminally ill. Most were disabled and depressed. At least five had no discernible illnesses whatsoever upon autopsy.

This has been the truth about Kevorkian from the very start. In 1991, Kevorkian's second victim, Marjorie Wantz, complained bitterly about unresolved pelvic pain. But she was an emotionally disturbed woman who had been in mental hospitals. Her autopsy showed no discernible pathology of any kind.