April 13, 2024

STEPHEN MILLER: O.J. Simpson was Patient Zero for our media culture.

If you lived through it, and I did, “spectacle” is the most generous term you could use to describe the media environment around the trial. It was the moment the entire media, seeing the ratings and attention tabloid shows were garnering, went all-in on the trash-exploitation and racial tropes that dominate news media today. Lead Simpson attorney Johnnie Cochran shamelessly made the trial about the LAPD versus another poor black man — and upon Simpson’s acquittal, was covered by television shows on Court TV and was an invited guest to Bill Clinton’s inauguration.

As Cochran stoked racial fires only a few short years after the Rodney King riots, Christopher Darden, a prosecutor during the trial, and a black man, was labeled a race traitor and an Uncle Tom.

Simpson’s legal team was dubbed “the Dream Team,” a label also attached to the 1992 Men’s Olympic basketball team. Sports and politics merged in a way that would later be seen in a way similar to Colin Kaepernick kneeling on the NFL sidelines. Jay Leno’s Tonight Show featured several dancing Asian men in black robes in a comedy segment he labeled “The Dancing Itos,” a reference to the judge of the trial.

Simpson attorney Robert Kardashian’s family later became national celebrities in their own right, with his wife Kris Jenner and her daughters cashing in millions on sex tapes and television shows, music albums, merchandise, perfumes and clothing lines.

In the middle of the trial, National Enquirer published leaked nude photos of lead prosecutor Marcia Clark, sold to them by an ex-husband. Everyone became a punchline, and a character, and a celebrity, due to and because of the guiding hand of the national media. Lost in all of it was the fact that two people had been brutally murdered.

Which brings us to the very alleged murderer himself. “Good Riddance, O. J. Simpson,” Jim Geraghty writes:

On the menu today: It almost always feels like the scourge of cancer targets those who deserve it the least. I say almost, because yesterday, cancer ended the life of O. J. Simpson. You can make a strong argument that Simpson turned into one of the most terribly influential Americans of the last quarter of the 20th century — terrible both in the scale of his influence and in the moral dimension of his influence.

The Myth of the ‘Juice’

O. J. Simpson passed away from cancer Thursday. The instant meme was an image of the late Norm McDonald declaring, “Finally, O.J. can rest, knowing that his wife’s killer is dead.”

Kids, you may not believe this, but in 1994, it seemed absurd that somebody who was rich and famous would be the kind of person capable of murdering two people. There was just this blanket assumption that anyone living a lifestyle of “champagne wishes and caviar dreams,” as Robin Leach described it, would be happy.

This was before Phil Spector, before Robert Blake, before Oscar Pistorius, before Aaron Hernandez.

This was before TMZ, before cell-phone cameras showcased every celebrity meltdown, tantrum, and other outburst. The rich and famous people in Hollywood, and their handlers and agents and consultants, exercised a lot more control over their images. This was also before #MeToo, and it was a few years before the country realized it had elected men who saw the White House interns as their own personal sex kittens — not just in 1992, but also in 1960.

You could say it was a more innocent time, but it is likely more accurate to say it was a more naïve time.

When O. J. Simpson was mentioned “as the focus of the investigation” on June 14, 1994, the initial overwhelming attitude among the public, white and black, was that it was unthinkable that the famous face could have committed such a bloody and heinous crime.

A large part of what made O.J. “unthinkable” as a murderer was the byproduct of being an NFL superstar. Pete Rozelle became commissioner of the league in 1960, and with the help of NFL Films, its omnipresent in-house propaganda machine, created a myth of hard-hitting warriors on the gridiron who were unassailable gentlemen off of it. Even after the O.J. trial, even after Rozelle stepped down from his perch in 1989, this myth soldiered on remarkably well until Colin Kaepernick and Rozelle’s successor finished it off for good in 2016: Roger Goodell Killed the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg.

In the 1960s, American culture was fracturing along a fault line, with the common man on one side and scorn against his mores and values on the other. The league’s commissioner at the time, Pete Rozelle, chose to take the side of ordinary Americans in the raging culture war, because they were his natural audience. The league sent star players to visit troops in Vietnam and issued rules requiring players to stand upright during the playing of the National Anthem.

In 1967, the NFL produced a film that combined sideline and game footage titled, “They Call It Pro Football.” The film was unapologetically hokey. It was crew cuts and high tops and lots of chain smoking into sideline telephones. With a non-rock, non-folk, non-“what’s happening now” soundtrack, heavy on trumpets and kettle drums. John Facenda, who would come to be called “The Voice of God” for his work with NFL Films, provided the vaulting narration. The production began with the words, “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun.” There was nothing Radical Chic about it.

The NFL surpassed baseball as America’s pastime with careful branding that conformed to the tastes and sensibilities of middle-class Americans – Nixon’s silent majority. A half century later, Roger Goodell would kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

In August 2016, America was experiencing a polarizing presidential election. San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat during the playing of the national anthem, to protest injustice. It was a politically divisive act directed at fans who regard the national anthem as something sacred. The league did not lift a finger to stop him.

Most employers don’t let their workers make controversial political statements to their customers. It is why you do not know your UPS driver’s views on the expansion of NATO. The Constitution does not prohibit private businesses from regulating speech during work.

A savvier commissioner would have reminded Kaepernick that he is being paid millions to wear the logo of the NFL, and the league does not permit players to use its brand to flaunt their personal politics. Instead, Roger Goodell permitted the pregame ceremonies to become the focus of intense political scrutiny, as the media lined up to catalog whether players stood, sat or knelt during the national anthem.

In retrospect, as somebody who had bought into Rozelle’s myth wholeheartedly, I’m glad that Kaepernick and Goodell finally buried it. That it could survive someone as heinous as O.J. Simpson is a testament to its strength, the gullibility of pro football’s most rabid fans — and whatever was going on this week in offices of the legacy media:

Even those formerly countercultural hippies at Rolling Stone bought into Pete Rozelle’s myth, based on the framing of this headline on Thursday: Norm Macdonald Was the Hater O.J. Simpson Could Never Outrun.

But then, some things never change at Rolling Stone:

As the 1960s kept ending, the next installment was the arrest of Charles Manson and four of his followers for the horrific murder of five people, including actress Sharon Tate, wife of Roman Polanski, at a luxury mansion north of Beverly Hills. When Manson’s trial began in 1970, Wenner [who would then have been about age 24–Ed] leaped at the story with an idea for the headline: “Charles Manson Is Innocent!”

Wenner’s headline was less insane than it sounds to modern ears. Manson was already an object of media obsession, a former Haight-Ashbury denizen who drifted to L.A. and collected hippie acolytes for LSD orgies and quasi-biblical prophecies. While the straight world viewed him as a monster, much of Wenner’s audience saw him, at least hypothetically, as one of their own. The underground press of Los Angeles, including the Free Press, cast him as the victim of a hippie-hating media. Manson was a rock-and-roll hanger-on. Wenner was convinced of Manson’s innocence by his own writer David Dalton, who had lived for a time with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, a Manson believer. “I’d go out driving in the desert with Dennis, and he’d say things to me like ‘Charlie’s really cosmic, man.’ ”

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Meanwhile, a lawyer in the DA’s office, believing he was doing a favor for a friend of [David] Felton’s at the Los Angeles Times and that this hippie rag from San Francisco was a benign nonentity, brought Felton [then-recently hired away from the L.A. Times by Wenner] and Dalton into the office to show them the crime scene photos of the butchered bodies of Manson victims — including a man with the word war etched in his stomach with a fork. Dalton blanched when he saw the words “Healter [sic] Skelter” painted in blood on a refrigerator, instantly recalling what Dennis Wilson told him about the coded instructions Manson heard in the Beatles songs. “It must have been the most horrifying moment of my life,” said Dalton. “It was the end of the whole hippie culture.” Jann Wenner changed the headline.

Which brings us back to where we started. While Rolling Stone remains stuck in radical chic 1969, what explains the rest of the legacy media?

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll