IN THE FIRST half of 2016, O.J. Simpson, who still resides in a Nevada prison for his bungled robbery of sports memorabilia, seemed to be everywhere. First, there was the FX series “The People vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story,” a high-quality, behind-the-scenes dramatization of Simpson’s 1995 murder trial. Then came “O.J.: Made in America,” a seven-and-a-half hour epic ESPN documentary in which director Ezra Edelman finally gives the Simpson story its due as a landmark event in the history of U.S. attitudes toward race, celebrity, and domestic violence, and in the evolution of our mass media culture.
Among other things, the O.J. Simpson murder trial marked the end of an era in which professional journalists observed events, then summarized and framed them into a coherent narrative for public consumption. This legacy of the print age persisted well into the broadcast era. Until the late 20th century, live, real-time TV coverage was limited to things like sporting events, inaugurations, and moonshots, or national disasters. Otherwise, the world was presented to TV viewers in one neat, 30-minute daily package at 6 p.m.
Like everything else in American culture, this started to change as cable replaced over-the-air broadcasting and specialty channels proliferated. In 1979, C-SPAN started running gavel-to-gavel coverage of the generally somnolent proceedings of the U.S. Congress. But CNN came along the next year to make things such as a toddler falling down a well in Texas into a national melodrama. True, CNN also went wall-to-wall on things such as the Iran-Contra investigations and the first Iraq war, but in the months between legitimate big events it also whipped up essentially local stories, such as child disappearances or shark attacks, into manufactured national crises.
In 1991, noting that judges all over the country were allowing video cameras into their courtrooms, journalist and lawyer Steven Brill started Court TV to present sensational true crime stories as they happened. That same year computer scientists opened for public use something they were calling the World Wide Web.
So the media stars and planets were all aligned on that fateful June night in 1994 when, as a civil court jury found three years later, O.J. Simpson caused the wrongful deaths of his ex-wife and her friend.
As Edelman’s epic mini-series proves, the Simpson case was a genuine national tragedy. In one strand of the story we see Simpson, a black man who succeeded in the white man’s world on the strength of his talent, brains, and winning personality. The other strand is the story of the African-American community in Los Angeles and its decades of abuse by the local police and courts. The tragic irony was delivered when the two strands came together in an L.A. criminal court in 1995. There Simpson, who is quoted as having once said, “I’m not black; I’m O.J.,” had to defend himself by hooking his case onto the narrative of black oppression.
It’s a tale worthy of Theodore Dreiser or Toni Morrison, or Sophocles for that matter. But on America’s TV screens, and in the embryonic chat rooms of the nascent internet, it degenerated into an orgy of gossip, glitter, and gotcha.
O.J. Simpson was acquitted in that criminal court on Oct. 3, 1995, and in the next decade U.S. media culture plunged into the abyss. In 1996, MSNBC and Fox News appeared, and a gossip website called the Drudge Report was launched. Two years later, all practice of politics and government as we knew it faded behind a crazed obsession with the appalling details of President Bill Clinton’s sex life. Then came reality TV and social media and a twittering apprentice running for president.
CNN founder Ted Turner, safe behind his billions, must sometimes wonder at what he has wrought.
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!