O.J. Simpson was Patient Zero for our media culture

In the 2017 film I, Tonya, a biopic based on the Tonya Harding conspiracy and attack on figure skater Nancy Kerrigan, Martin Maddox (actor Bobby Cannavale) describes himself as a reporter for Hard Copy and calls it a “a pretty crappy show that ‘legitimate’ news outlets looked down on — and then became.”

There was an entire spurt of tabloid news programming that spawned up in the 1990s, Hard Copy being one of them, along with Inside Edition, which gave us Bill O’Reilly. The attack on Kerrigan had all the tabloid fodder for those shows to build audiences, but figure skating was a niche sport — and with all the obscure players involved, it never caught the imaginations of the news media in quite the same way as the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, the subsequent spectacle that would surround O.J. Simpson, his attempted flee down the highway, his surrender and eventually his trial and acquittal.

“If it bleeds, it leads” has always been a media cliché describing network news coverage. The double murders of which Simpson was suspected of committing took it to heights never previously seen — and they’ve never come down from it.

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.

That did not stop the media from partaking in creating its own celebrities. Nancy Grace rose to prominent national fame for her hot takes during the trial. Gregg Jarrett went on to Fox News, Greta Van Susteren made her name on CNN during the trial. Then ABC News legal analyst Dan Abrams was boosted into the mainstream and would use the attention to create his own media website, Mediaite. David Gregory went on to become the host of Meet the Press and Jeanine Pirro became a national host over at Fox News.

Ratings and money poured in for everyone involved and the media would continue their salacious new appetite for trash style exploitation into the JonBenét Ramsey murder and later, Lorena Bobbitt and the Clinton impeachment. You might even argue the mainstream media’s desire to embrace tabloid-style gossip journalism led directly how they would go on to cover Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign. Some lessons were never learned.