RIP OJ: The Start of the Modern Media Era
Before the OJ Simpson verdict, blacks had no confidence in the legal system. After OJ’s verdict, no one had confidence in the system. But June 1994 commemorates the start of the “stupendous and stupefying media: That is the network anchormen and anchorwomen.”
“I’m Not Black, I’m OJ”
OJ, aka Orenthal James Simpson, starred in commercials, like this 1978 Hertz ad. The Hertz campaign, which ran for years, was one of the first times an American audience saw a Black spokesperson for a major national company. OJ later went on to become a movie star.
Peggy Noonan in the WSJ writes how OJ Simpson’s verdict didn’t just divide the country. It emphasized the differences: the verdict on the beloved Buffalo Bills running back (according to some: OJ was the best of all time).
It was 30 years ago this June that Dick and I were n Laconia NH; our first motorcycle trip to Bike Week, Laconia, NH. The cinder block hotel in downtown Laconia was more prison-like than resort friendly. It was before the age of the Internet and search engines, and I don’t remember how on earth we found an inn in Tamworth, NH, about 30 miles north of Laconia. The owners as I recall were from California, he a former banker and she a would-be-chef eager to meddle in the inn’s kitchen.
The Fall of an American Hero
So out of the Harley madness were we and smack dab in the middle of what looked like casting for a Bob Newhart series. Adding to the Bob Newhart mystic was a pub full of locals, each vying for a walk-on role. What united us that evening was the “chase” Yes, the OJ chase when police cruisers tried to surround the famous running back’s white Ford Bronco.
Los Angeles police, angered that the 1968 Heisman Trophy winner reneged on a promise to surrender earlier in the day, mounted a manhunt for OJ and a former teammate. As Ms. Noonan writes in the WSJ:
Everyone over 40 this weekend will be saying, “I’ll never forget when I heard the verdict,” and, “Did you watch the Bronco?” The case burned itself into our retinas; everyone in the country was in the path of totality.
The Beginning of Hyper-Celebrity
It was the beginning of hyper-celebrity and marked by the emotionalism of crowds. Crowds ran to California freeway overpasses on June 17, 1994, to see the Ford Bronco containing Simpson roll by, surrounded by police cruisers. They cheered and pumped their arms.
The O.J. case didn’t create mass celebrity, Hollywood did, in the 1920s. At that time a young teenager named Bette Davis went, on a lark, to a fortune teller in her small New England town. She recounts in one of her memoirs that the fortune teller read her palm and was puzzled: Your face will be famous in every corner of the earth, she said.
Dave Zirin, the sports editor at The Nation, felt that the trial was a giant Rorschach test. OJ saw himself as a figure of unity despite the trial being about racism, police corruption, gender, domestic abuse, and a two-tiered justice system that favors the wealthy and famous.
If the signal moment was the Bronco chase, it was the court case that would have lasting significance. It was a prime example of how our legal system got bogged down in distractions, inanities, and poor police and legal work. It dragged on nine months. The judge, Lance Ito, also became a celebrity, and apparently liked it. He kept three open computers on his bench. No one had ever seen that before.
It would be easy to say OJ Simpson get away with murder. But did he?
… it stalked him the rest of his life. And that is tragedy, too, because he’d been such a hero, a winner of the Heisman Trophy, a football star, a man of great accomplishment whom everyone admired.
The O.J. case revealed so much and started a new age, continues Peggy Noonan.
Within a few years the internet would become ubiquitous, and at that point the new age would become more so.