O.J. Simpson on trial trying on the infamous gloves: NAJ screen shot

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Please forgive me, sensational news readers, for taking a Spring Break from all the clickbait over the past few days to sit outside and drink in the clean air and sunshine after months of being cooped up inside hiding from the winter cold, the pounding rain and howling winds of March and April.

When I saw and shared the O.J. Simpson NYTimes obituary on Facebook the other day, my instinct was to run from the computer and the internet and head outside for a comfortable camp chair and a strong drink.

But as Donald Trump faces the inside of a courtroom in New York on Monday as the first president ever to face criminal prosecution, I knew that the news of OJs so-called “trial of the (last) century” would weigh on what could be considered the trial of the century of this time, with a corresponding level of media coverage and hype.

Donald Trump on trial in New York: NAJ screen shot

After a few days passed, providing some time to contemplate the significance of it all, the Washington Post finally ran a story similar to what I was thinking: How the OJ trial changed the American press and media at the time, and not for the better.

The Post writer focuses, however, on blaming OJ for creating reality television, a charge that contains some truth. It just misses a larger point for me.

As it happened, I was teaching journalism at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in 1994 while working on a Master’s degree when the OJ murder case story broke. I watched along with an estimated 95 million viewers as Simpson tried to flee from police on the Los Angeles freeway in that white Ford Bronco.

As the mainstream press was being beaten badly and scooped by the tabloid press, and the new 24-hour cable news cycle found a story that would hold the attention of audiences for days at a time, a media transformation was already underway in the very early days of the internet.

In all of my education, training and experience up to that time, we emphasized serious news about public affairs and looked down upon celebrity tabloid news. I was already covering the environment as a beat then, and sensational news about crime and celebrities was mainly the domain of the tabloids like the National Enquirer. But nearly overnight, even the stodgy and conservative Associated Press changed its tune and started covering celebrity news and sensational crime again like the penny papers in the 19th century.

As the story unfolded, the Post writes, “the tabloids invested heavily in trying to get every twist and turn, often leaving mainstream news in the dust.”

“There was unimaginable pressure on everybody in Los Angeles working for every news organization to get scoops,” said Michael Socolow, who was running the breaking news desk at CNN’s Los Angeles bureau for only three months when the Bronco chase happened.

Shows like Geraldo Rivera’s new CNBC program “Rivera Tonight” devoted every night to the trial. Other shows like “Hard Copy,” “A Current Affair” and “Entertainment Tonight” feasted on the interest it generated.

“After O.J., what they realized is they could obtain enormously high ratings with very cheap production costs, no actors, no producers, no writers and no sets,” Socolow said.

The court essentially produced the show, piped through a box outside the courthouse to stations that wanted the feed.

“I don’t think people realized how cheap the O.J. Simpson production was,” Socolow said. But they found out pretty quickly.

After OJ was acquitted at trial, the newly sensational mainstream press and cable news went looking for other sensational celebrity stories to bolster circulation, advertising revenue and ratings.

They found Michael Jackson in suspicious relationships with children, and hammered him for years. Then along came Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern who was said to have had some kind of a sexual affair with a president, a story broken not by the New York Times, AP or even CNN. Matt Drudge with a news site on the web called The Drudge Report got those breaks, and the values that had guided news editors for decades changed forever.

Producers and Hollywood executives were paying attention, as Socolow said. But CNN had actually come into its own as a news outlet during the first Gulf War in 1990. When most of the news correspondents for CBS, NBC and ABC had been kicked out of all the nicest hotels in Iraq and left the country in advance of the U.S. invasion to save Kuwait, the CNN crew was staying in a less expensive hotel on the other side of Baghdad and managed to keep correspondents inside the country to cover the beginning of the war.

But the OJ case proved the enduring power and appeal of 24-hour cable news, and forced daily newspaper chains into rethinking their own coverage priorities. No one could have predicted the grip the trial was going to have on the American psyche, but cable TV was made for the moment.

Unfortunately for them, the Trump hush money trial in New York will not be televised live like the OJ case was in LA, so reading the coverage of it will still have some value for news outlets online. New York court rules do not allow audio-visual coverage of trials with video cameras inside the courtroom.

Sorry Court TV fans. But the trial will provide 24-7 material for commentators on talk radio and cable TeeVee talk.

Personally, I will not be paying much attention to the daily reality TV show. But like a majority of Americans, I will be awaiting with heightened interest for the verdict. If Trump is the first president to be found guilty and convicted of a felony crime, surely that will make it far less likely that he could be elected president again in November.

Far more important for the country than charges of sex and hush money and Stormy Daniels, however, we await with even more interest how the United States Supreme Court will rule on Trump’s claims of executive immunity from prosecution for engaging in a seditious conspiracy and inciting a violent insurrection in a corrupt plot to overturn the results of the presidential election of 2020.

“What is taking the court so long to tackle these issues?” we all wonder. Only the future of American democracy is at stake.

Related: Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Trump’s Immunity Appeal
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