Why are clobs always "0"

I have tested the most recent driver in three different SQL IDEs, and now with an application I'm writing that uses JDBC metadata, the comment on a field definition also isn't available as a string value.

The only thing I ever see regarding data type "text" field values are either a 0 or a 1; neither of which applies.

So why is this happening, even from the JDBC metadata results as well?