OJ Simpson media coverage - 8 July 1994

In 60 years of watching and reporting American affairs, I can't remember a time when a single topic that obsessed the whole of America has gone so little reported in Europe, in Britain anyway where I spent a hot week at the beginning of the month. I'm talking about the scandal to which I devoted reluctantly devoted all of last week's talk, the OJ Simpson affair.

The spontaneous response I can hear from very many listeners – who is OJ Simpson? – explains at once why among European editors no interest is assumed or taken, absolutely understandable except for the scruple I mentioned last week about not reporting a case that has not yet come to trial. That might be the answer in the English media; I was told so by one good English friend who assured me that the rule of no comment from the press on cases sub judice, under determination by the courts, was still strictly observed by the British press, the media.

I was amazed – not for long. Last Friday morning the three or four most, how shall I say, respectable of English national newspapers had blazing headlines about a peer who is being investigated over, quote, "alleged", unquote, insider trading, to be found guilty of which, the three papers were very quick to mention could entail a sentence of seven years in jail, reams of reporting on an alleged crime for which the man is not yet charged and so has certainly not come to trial. So much for the old British scruple.

I had the passing thought that perhaps it was simply good taste on the part of the British press that kept any mention of OJ Simpson out of the papers and off the air, but surely it's a little late in the day for the British press to be exercising good taste in not reporting a double murder. I don't propose to set up the plot as I did a week ago, but just to say for now, I find it impossible at the moment to think up a figure in Briton of comparable fame and attractiveness. People have mentioned famous soccer players unknown in America, rock stars – they'd be known but so far have not been charged with a crime anything like as horrendous as the one which OJ Simpson is alleged by the Los Angeles district attorney to have committed.

It's not enough to say that OJ – who is nationally known as OJ just as Bing Crosby was known to everybody in the world as Bing – not enough to say that he was the most dazzling running back that has ever appeared in American football. He attracted fans who knew little about football because of his good looks and his quicksilver grace, endowments that got him lucrative commercial contracts and motion picture roles the moment he retired from football.

The pre-trial coverage of the case has been so overwhelming and so prejudicial to OJ that about half the population doubts he can get a fair trial; 70% of all Americans think the media have gone overboard in excessive reporting, yet 9 in 10 say they read and watch. And what they had to watch this past week was a preliminary hearing before a judge in a Los Angeles courtroom, a hearing familiar perhaps to you in fact to the normal thing, but extraordinary in an American criminal case where you'd expect 99 times in 100 get an indictment handed down by a grand jury, but as I said a week ago, the judge dismissed a sitting grand jury because the Los Angeles police had released to television a radio tape of Mrs Simpson begging the police to come and save her from her husband who was heard in the background breaking in a door and roaring obscenities. This gave such vivid, such horrid emphasis to something that had been hushed up a year or two ago his being found guilty of beating this same young wife.

Well in California, court proceedings are allowed to be televised. This is a decision for each state to make and the day-long hearings have received day-long coverage, so that the three main networks suspended their soap operas and normal programmes, one even restricted the evening news to nothing but the Los Angeles hearings. The quarter- and semi-finals of Wimbledon and some World Cup games were simply skipped in favour of OJ's hearings. The great newspapers the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times of course fully reported the startling decision of Yasser Arafat to make his headquarters in the Gaza Strip and there was the usual large troop of correspondents tagging along behind President Clinton on his trip to Europe, but the television audience that doesn't spend much time with newspapers probably couldn't have told you whether President Clinton was in Europe, Little Rock or leading the troops soon in the much publicised invasion of Haiti. By the way, this is the first invasion I've ever heard about, which announces its probable date and reports fully on the training of 1,000 commandos and lists the ports and airfields that are to be seized.

So the coverage of the Los Angeles hearings has suffocated most of the news and will probably only be surpassed when, if the case comes to trial. The chances of a trial greatly increased on Wednesday when the judge allowed as evidence some things the defence wanted to have excluded. Remember, the detectives found the bodies of Mrs Simpson and the man friend just outside her house in pools of blood, two miles away is the home of OJ. The detectives went to tell him of the slaughter, they rang and got no answer. It was very early in the morning, they waited, no response, they saw OJ's car parked on the street and a spot of blood on the drivers door, they tried the house intercom and the telephone, no answer from anyone, so they climbed the walls of the estate and there found bloodstains on the driveway and a glove, they say matched one found at the scene of the crime.

The defence lawyer affected to be outraged by the fact that the detectives entered the OJ home without a search warrant and therefore their evidence should be excluded, but the judge said the detectives did not go in, quote, "like storm troopers fanning out over the property, examining every leaf, every car, every closet", they were working for a benevolent purpose in light of a brutal attack and they feared for a further loss of life.

So the first big blow at the defence position that evidence will be allowed in deciding whether or not there is a case against Mr Simpson. The lamentations over the huge media coverage of this horror have been reported so far as I can see in only one serious British newspaper, but these laments are shared in the United States itself in a lusty bout of mea culpa, many papers are editorially deploring the vast space given to the Simpson's hearing not only in somebody else's paper, but in their own.

I think the, the most sensible voice in this banshee howl is that of a famous Chicago columnist Mike Royko, who says correctly that of course the media, the people are riveted by the story since OJ Simpson is the most famous American to be accused of a killing in this century, if not, in the past two centuries.

It's true and we've all been riffling through the history books and everybody's come up with a comparable scandal in 1804, the vice president of the United States Aaron Burr had a political rival whom he detested as much for his brilliant intellect as for his rather aristocratic political opinions, he was Alexander Hamilton, subsequently the first secretary of the treasury, one of the three founding fathers who pamphleteered in many searching papers for the adoption of the Constitution.

In 1804, the Vice President challenged Hamilton to a dual and on the Jersey bluffs across the Hudson, Burr shot and mortally wounded Hamilton 190 years ago this coming Monday. Do you suppose if there had been 72 channels of television, which most of us have without having to pay for half a dozen extra ones, do you suppose there would have been no massive television coverage?

The day before the dual, Hamilton wrote a passing thought. This democracy, he said, is not for me, that word was a new word then, it had been mentioned only once in the debate leading to the writing of the Constitution. George Washington announced that among civilised governments, democracy is the form held in most disrepute. Hear, hear, they all said and it was never even discussed as a desirable or possible form of government for the new nation to embrace, but once discussion of the form passed from the eastern landholders and merchants and bankers and lawyers to the farmers and mountaineers and river men, democracy was heard from and came to triumph, as you may have heard. It seems to me inevitable that given democracy and television, people of all kinds are bound to find themselves in the position of the millions polled who say by 7 to 3 that there's too much coverage, but who are the same people by 9 to 1 watch it.

I remember the enormous hullabaloo here as in Britain and indeed throughout the world in December 1936, when King Edward VIII, besotted with an earlier Mrs Simpson, faced the prospect of abdication. Our headlines were as black and blanketing as yours, there was no television but the radio hammered and prattled night and day, I contributed about 400,000 words from London myself. There was a small body or cabal in Congress that hated all this attention being given to an American woman divorcée in love with the king of England. What, one of them cried is all the fuss about? The old famous Baltimore newspaperman HL Mencken said, "the fuss, it's quite simple, it's the biggest story since the crucifixion."

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