The OJ Simpson trial paved the way for ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians,’ TMZ and a slew of questions about race

After chasing a slow pace, American media culture quickly gained momentum.

NEW YORK (AP) — The plaintive wail of a dog. A courtroom couplet that became a cultural slogan about gloves. A judge and lawyers who became media darlings and villains. AND barely confused guy briefly elevated to a barely dazed star. Disturbing questions about race it still echoes. The starting of the Kardashian dynasty. Some epic slow motion highway chase. And lest we forget, two people whose lives were brutally ended.

And the nation watched – a very different nation than today, where the voracity for reality television has increased. The mentality of viewers from those confusing days in 1994 and 1995, novel at the time, has since turn into an integral part of the American fabric. The hit was at the center of the national conversation OJ Simpson, one of the most interesting cultural figures in recent US history.

Simpson’s death on Wednesday almost exactly thirty years after the killings that turned his fame from football hero to suspect brought back memories of the strange moment – no, let’s call it what it was, which was profoundly strange – wherein a smartphone-less country craned its neck toward clunky televisions to look at A Ford Bronco speeding down a California highway.

“It was an incredible moment in American history,” Wolf Blitzer said while anchoring CNN’s coverage of Simpson’s death on Thursday. What made this occur – aside from tabloid culture, of course, and the basic news value of such a big name accused of such brutal murders?

A saga awaited by the twenty first century media

At a time when the Internet as we understand it was still in its infancy, when a “platform” was still just a place to board a train, Simpson was a special kind of celebrity. It was truly transmedia, a harbinger of the digital age – a walking, talking crossover story for multiple audiences.

It was a sport – the pinnacle of football perfection. He was a star not only because of his athletic ability, but additionally because of his skills Hertz-hawking runs at airports on TV and acting in movies like “The Naked Gun.” He embodied society’s questions about race, class and money long before the stabbings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman on June 12, 1994.

Then got here the saga, starting with the killings and ending – only technically – in a Los Angeles courtroom over a 12 months later. The most epic of American novels had nothing about this era in the mid-Nineteen Nineties. Americans were watching. Americans talked about watching. Americans debated. Americans assessed. And Americans watched some more.

The multi-generational divide between white and black Americans was not helped by Time magazine’s decision to tactically darken Simpson’s cover photo for dramatic – and many say racist – effect. For those that lived through this era, it’s difficult to recall much in the public sphere that was not displaced by the O.J. storyline and its many elements, including the subsequent civil trial that found Simpson responsible for the death. One newspaper even published a series of possible plot endings written by crime novel authors.

Sure, people said various things. But it was undoubtedly a national conversation.

The nation – and its media – is now rather more divided. Nowadays, Americans rarely gather around a virtual campfire for a shared experience; as an alternative, small bushfires attract area of interest crowds to virtual corners, providing equally intense, but smaller, shared experiences. This week’s eclipse was a rare exception.

In 1994, every day wall-to-wall coverage was still emerging. Sure, we had Walter Cronkite in the process Kennedy’s assassination and again in progress the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention. And the first Gulf War in 1991 firmly established expectations for live television. But coverage of the Bronco chase and trial whetted the appetite in a way no other event did. Even now, such widespread viewing is rare.

“The media we consume is much more dispersed now. It’s so rare that we’re all glued to the same spectacle,” said Danielle Lindemann, author of the 2022 book “The True Story: What Reality Television Says About Us.”

“In 1994, we watched our televisions and followed news reports,” Lindemann, a professor of sociology at Lehigh University, wrote in an email. “But there was no parallel discourse going on on social media.”

Connections between then and now

It’s not hard to find connections between the Simpson saga and modern history.

Judges and lawyers dealing with high-profile cases are regularly in the spotlight. One of Simpson’s lawyers, Robert Kardashian, paved the way for the next generation of his family change the face of celebrity action. A local Los Angeles television reporter who covered the case Harvey Levin, then founded TMZ, an incredibly fundamental pillar of modern, multi-platform celebrity coverage – and the channel that broke the news of Simpson’s death.

And of course, like so many American stories, there may be a difficulty of race.

Simpson’s acquittal on murder charges exposed a fundamental error: some blacks welcomed the verdict, while many whites were in disbelief. Simpson probably confuses the matter further over the years, famously saying, “I’m not black. I’m OJ.” But for many black Americans who felt that their interactions with police and courts had produced unfair outcomes, the acquittal was a notable exception.

“There was a sense that the only justice was for a rich black man to get out of prison when a rich white man did,” said John Baick, a history professor at Western New England University.

Three a long time later, that conversation is not over – he’s definitely still talking about it with students. On Thursday, Baick invoked Simpson to speak in school about race, fame and wealth; only after its completion did he learn that his subject had died.

A generation has passed since these events were fresh. And after hundreds of hours of film, thousands and thousands of written words and countless talking heads, the OJ Simpson case stands as two things: an American moment like no other, and an interlude that encapsulated a lot of what American culture is and is becoming.

Out of weird old America comes an obsession with brutal true crime and a bizarre forged of film noir villains and heroes, not to say tragedy and mystery. It was also a harbinger of an emerging, fragmented web culture that, in a few years, would give us smartphones, social media, reality TV saturation, and live coverage of just about the whole lot.

Was it, as many loudly said, “the trial of the century”? It’s subjective. But every culture is made of little pieces, and the Simpson case left behind many of them. It’s an indisputable truth: after chasing a slow pace, American media culture has quickly gained momentum. So quickly that many of the case’s central questions – about race, justice, and how we eat murder and misery as just one other set of consumer products – remain unanswered.

“Where does this fit in? What do Americans think about it now?” Baick wonders. “What you think of OJ Simpson may be a litmus test for a long time.”

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