O.J. Simpson Did It – But So Did The Media

The Horror

O.J. Simpson, the washed-up football star who killed two people and got away with it, died on April 11. But the media disaster that his arrest and subsequent trial created is unfortunately very much with us to this day.

I was 17 years old when the whole thing started in June 1994 with the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. It was impossible to look away. Everyone knew who O.J. was and the nation watched in real time as the story unfurled with every grisly, ghastly and lurid twist and turn.

In today’s world it feels perfectly normal to watch a cluster of television cameras follow along with minute-by-minute “developments” on a story (which usually turn out to be nothing), while pundits in the studio speculate endlessly. But the Simpson saga managed to take these already existing elements (CNN had launched back in 1980) and give them a massive injection of salacious steroids.

Because Simpson was a prominent former athlete from the biggest sports league and had been on TV and movie screens for most of his adult life, the press knew it had a big deal in its hands. The victims of the homicide were also attractive residents of Los Angeles and it felt as if everything was pre-destined for disaster.

And of course, the most toxic element in America was involved: Race. Simpson was rarely interested in his Blackness before he was charged with murder and had famously declined to be a part of the civil rights movement in his younger days. But when he faced jail time he got “Black” real quick and his defense team, led by Johnnie Cochran, exploited the hell out of it.

So did the press. They highlighted the Simpson teams racial allegations, most notably in the cross examination of Detective Mark Fuhrman, a racist who would go on to find a home at Fox News (where there are lots of racists). At the time the media gang seemed almost sad that the Simpson verdict wouldn’t end up generating the kind of rioting that the Rodney King verdict had in 1992.

The story shows us the nihilism of the mainstream media, where human tragedy and racial strife are merely story elements used to juice ratings. As the Goldman family has pointed out over the decades, the media circus regularly minimized the victims at the center of the crime and instead emphasized O.J’s dramatics and the clownish circle of hangers-on that became “famous” during the case (Kato Kaelin, Faye Resnick, etc.)

When Simpson unfortunately secured his “not guilty” verdict, the clown show did not stop. It just migrated to more and more stories. Television news fully embraced its role as national soap opera and now every news story comes across as a saga with heroes, villains and grotesque side characters.

This notion is felt most of all, I would argue, in the realm of political coverage. Reporters are clearly bored about the details of policy even though a single decision can affect literal billions of lives. They are instead entranced by George W. Bush’s “regular guy” demeanor, Barack Obama’s star quality, and particularly the nonstop drama around Donald Trump.

Trump’s body count far outweighs O.J.’s and the media is now openly lusting for the return of their cash cow.

The O.J. story wasn’t a sudden turning point that turned the press from bad to good, but the moment of the story – as America and the world began to fully accelerate into the domain of media saturation and the earliest stages of digital culture – certainly stands out as a capital-M moment.

We live in a world that thankfully has one less domestic abuser and murderer in it, but we also live in a society where the circus he started now plagues all of our lives.

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— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on Threads @owillis1977

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