NEW YORK (AP) — The sad wail of a dog. A courtroom duet that turned into a cultural emblem about gloves. The judge and lawyers who became media darlings and villains. a A little confused guest He rose, briefly, to a slightly bewildered celebrity. worrying Questions about race This echo still. The beginning of the Kardashian dynasty. that Epic slow motion highway chase. And lest we forget, two people whose lives were brutally ended.
And there was a nation watching, a nation very different from today's, where the thirst for reality television has doubled. The bystander mentality that prevailed in those turbulent days of 1994 and 1995, then new, has since become an integral part of the American fabric. The slap was at the heart of the national conversation oj simpson, One of the most curious cultural figures in modern US history.
Simpson died Wednesday, Nearly three decades after the killings that changed his reputation from football hero to suspect, he recalled memories of a strange moment in time — no, let's call it what it was, which was very strange — in which a smartphone-free nation craned its neck toward devices. Old TV to watch a Ford Bronco make its way along a California highway.
“It was an amazing moment in American history,” Wolf Blitzer said while presenting coverage of Simpson's death Thursday on CNN. What made it so – of course, beyond tabloid culture and the basic news value of such a famous person accused of such brutal crimes?
The anticipated saga of 21st century media
In an era when the Internet as we know it was still nascent, when “the platform” was still just a place to ride a train, Simpson was a unique breed of celebrity. It was truly transmedia, a harbinger of the digital age – a walking, talking crossover story for multiple audiences.
FILE – Buffalo Bills running back OJ Simpson, 32, runs over some teammates as he catches Joe Delameleur, 68, during an NFL football game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Reach Stadium in Buffalo, New York, September 3, 1977. Pirate Council Rudolf (78) follows on the right. (Photo/AP File)
He was an athlete – the pinnacle of football excellence. He was a star, not only because of his athletic prowess, but also because of his abilities Hertz-Hawking passes through airports On television and starring in films such as “The Naked Gun.” He embodied societal questions about race, class, and money long before Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were stabbed to death on June 12, 1994.
Then came the epic, starting with murder and murder It ends – only technically – in a Los Angeles courtroom After more than a year. Most American epic novels had nothing on this period from the mid-1990s. Watch The Americans. Americans talked about watching. The Americans discussed. American rule. Americans saw more.
The generation-long gulf between white Americans and black Americans was not helped by Time magazine's decision to tactically black out the image of Simpson on its cover for dramatic and — many said — racist effect. For those who lived through that period, it is difficult to remember much in the public domain that has not been crowded out by the OJ story and its many components, including the subsequent civil trial that found Simpson responsible for the deaths. One newspaper even published a series of possible endings to the story written by mystery novelists.
Sure, people were saying different things. But it was, without a doubt, a national conversation.
FILE – Defendant OJ Simpson is flanked by his defense attorney, from left, Johnny L. Cochran Jr., Peter Neufeld, Robert Shapiro, Robert Kardashian, and Robert Placer, seated left, at the conclusion of defense arguments in his murder trial, Thursday, September 28, 1995, in Los Angeles. Football star and Hollywood actor Simpson, who was acquitted of charges he murdered his ex-wife and her friend but was later found responsible in a separate civil trial, has died. He was 76 years old. (Sam Mircovich/Pool Photo via AP, File)
The nation – and its media – are now much more divided. Americans these days rarely gather around a virtual campfire for a shared experience; Instead, small wildfires attract niche crowds into virtual corners for equally intense, but smaller, shared experiences. This week's eclipse was a rare exception.
In 1994, daily wall-to-wall coverage was still emerging. Sure, we had Walter Cronkite during that Kennedy assassination And again during The chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention. The First Gulf War in 1991 strongly boosted expectations for live television. But coverage of the Bronco chase and trial fed the appetite in a way that no other event did. Until now, such global sightings are rare.
“The media we consume is much more diffuse now. It's very rare that we're all glued to the same scene,” said Danielle Lindemann, author of the 2022 book True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us.
“In 1994, we were watching our televisions and following the news coverage,” Lindemann, a sociology professor at Lehigh University, said in an email. “But there was no parallel discourse happening across social media.”
Communications between then and now
It's not hard to find connections between the Simpson saga and today.
Judges and lawyers in high-profile cases are now a regular source of the spotlight. One of Simpson's lawyers, Robert Kardashian, paved the way For the next generation of his family To change the face of how celebrities work. A local Los Angeles TV reporter who covered the case, Harvey Levin, founder of TMZ, A glaring mainstay of modern multi-platform celebrity coverage — and the outlet that broke the news of Simpson's death.
FILE – Crowd members react as OJ Simpson leaves Los Angeles County Superior Court, Tuesday, Feb. 4, 1997, in Santa Monica, Calif., after hearing the verdict in the civil wrongful death trial against OJ Simpson. Football star and Hollywood actor Simpson, who was acquitted of charges of murdering his ex-wife and her friend but later found responsible in a separate civil trial, has died. He was 76 years old. (AP Photo/Susan Sterner, File)
And of course, as with many American stories, There is the issue of race.
Simpson's acquittal of murder charges revealed a fundamental error: some blacks welcomed the verdict, while many whites were in disbelief. Simpson may have complicated matters over the years when he famously said: “I'm not black. I'm not black.” I'm OJ But for many black Americans who felt that their interactions with police and courts led to unfair outcomes, the acquittal was a notable exception.
“There was a feeling that it was fair for a rich black man to go down when a rich white man did it,” said John Pike, a history professor at Western New England University.
Three decades later, this conversation is far from over, and he certainly still discusses it with students. On Thursday, Pike summoned Simpson to talk about race, fame and fortune in class; Only after he finished did he discover that his subject had died.
It has been a generation since these events were new. After thousands of hours of video, millions of written words and countless speakers, the OJ Simpson case stands as two things: an unparalleled American moment, and a watershed that encapsulates so much of what American culture is and has become. .
From weird, old America, I got the obsession with violent true crime and its twisted cast of villains and heroes in film noir, not to mention tragedy and crime. It was a trailer for the emerging, fragmented internet culture that would, in a few years, give us smartphones, social media, saturated reality TV, and live coverage of just about everything.
Was this, as many loudly said, “the trial of the century”? This is personal. But any culture is made up of small parts, and the Simpson case left a lot of those parts in its wake. This is indisputably true: after slow chase, American media culture has become much faster, much faster. So quickly, in fact, that many of the central questions about this issue — about race, justice, and how we consume murder and misery as just another set of consumer products — remain unanswered.
“Where does this fit in? What do Americans think about this now?” “What do you think OJ Simpson might be a real test for for a long time,” Pike asks.
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Ted Anthony, AP's director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation, has been writing about American culture since 1990 and oversees AP's coverage of trends and culture. Follow him on http://twitter.com/anthonyted.
