Presswatch/Medea and the O.J. Media
Corry, John
Medea and the O.J. Media by John Corry S ay now that the O.J. Simpson case is gripping, and that there has never been anything quite like it before: a double murder and its aftermath played out in...
...The money is a temporary salve—a pain killer that allows the athlete to get through a day, a life, a career...
...Prominent journalists could not find much to empathize with there, and although Tyson was convicted on the most slender evidence, few thought of it as a tragedy...
...The head of the nation's largest civil-rights organization was attaching a moral stigma to an ebony, as opposed to café-au-lait, color...
...This seemed bizarre, although in the ensuing argument, no prominent journalist ornews organization joined in to take Time's side...
...A Times editorial even declared that it was precisely because the case was a tragedy that it had gripped the national interest...
...The truth was obscure, but the reference to skin tone was prophetic...
...In a sensitive age such as ours, political correctness takes precedence over aesthetics...
...Even Peter Jennings began musing about "the enormous pressure of the media on every inch of the story...
...Onassis at approximately age 30, while People filled a "commemorative issue" with similar glamorous pictures...
...And probably it was the right choice, and surely "An American Tragedy" was meant to be nonjudgmental...
...Bailey and his colleagues notwithstanding, the press has been fair, or as fair as it probably can be, to their client...
...The media are susceptible to conventional beauty, and do what they can to promote it...
...T his was a mistake...
...Moreover, Tyson practiced a brutal profession, and hit other men with his fists...
...Bailey may be seen on CNN now, arguing that he has never seen pretrial publicity this bad, and preparing the ground for an appeal if his client is convicted...
...But contrast the press treatment of Simpson with its treatment of Mike Tyson, another gifted athlete who also was born poor and black...
...Certainly the trial will be a circus, but there is no reason to think that will be to Simpson's disadvantage...
...Nonetheless, as professional participants in the drama—"the live electronic drama," Tom Brokaw called it—they have been able to cloak their feelings...
...A consensus began to form...
...Murder may be explained—diminished capacity, temporary insanity, disadvantaged circumstances—but rape has no alleviating factors...
...The tone of the coverage has been more elegiac than censorious, and "An American Tragedy" suggests that the guilt is shared, diffuse, and not anyone's in particular...
...There is no contest between Simpson's sculpted cheekbones and Tyson's beetling brows...
...But Time, Newsweek, and U.S...
...Then, the day after Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell ruled that Simpson must face trial, the enterprising New York Post published the findings of two experts who had studied his handwriting...
...0 The American Spectator September 1994 49...
...More likely it will work in his favor...
...An older, more interesting woman gave way to an ephemeral Jackie...
...The expression on his face was not merely blank now...
...Obviously we will continue to hear this...
...The larger questions, though, were about race and the nature of victims, and they troubled John Corry is The American Spectator's regular Presswatch columnist and author of the new book, My Times: Adventures in the News Trade (Grosset/G.P...
...The characters of classical tragedy accepted their grim passes...
...And indeed the pressure was enormous, although it was on the media as much as it was on the story...
...Colin Powell aside, it is hard to think of another male black celebrity who has so transcended race other than, perhaps, Bryant Gumbel...
...Nobody Knew: All his life he worked hard to be loved...
...The Simpson case could draw attention to the absence of women in power...
...The preliminary hearing could be seen on ten channels in New York, while the national news programs led with it more often than not, and only "MacNeil/Lehrer" had the audacity to sometimes ignore it...
...But behind the smile and the charm was a dangerous temper and a desperate need to get what he wanted"—that insisted he was nasty...
...The cameras linger on the one in a way that would have been unthinkable with the other...
...He was, by almost anyone's reckoning, ill-favored and homely, while Simpson, either in café au lait or Time's ebony, is extremely good-looking...
...There may have been a point there...
...A photo-illustrator, he said, had used computer imaging for artistic effect: The harshness of the mug shot—the merciless bright light, the stubble on Simpson's face, the cold specificity of the picture—had been shaped into an icon of tragedy...
...Simpson was picked up on a Friday, and two days later Cokie Roberts could explain on "This Week With David Brinkley" that the story was focusing our attention on spouse abuse...
...Rival Time, however, innocently reminded everyone he was black...
...F. Lee Bailey, another celebrated member of the team, first became famous when he was successful in overturning the conviction of Sam Sheppard, the Cleveland osteopath who had been found guilty of murdering his wife...
...Responding to "the storm of controversy," James Gaines, the managing editor, had to explain in a full-page letter "to our readers" in the next issue why Time darkened the mug shot...
...Putnam's Sons...
...the new idea was that we could see the criminal-justice system at work...
...it was bottomless...
...How could the press, especially television, justify all the attention it was paying to O.J...
...He said Time had tried to portray Simpson as "some kind of animal...
...Joseph Lowery, the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who also have joined in the argument, will in the future stay silent...
...Attempted or alleged, it is always heinous...
...Newsweek said Simpson had transcended race: "His genial, race-neutral style went down easily with white audiences...
...In fact, although prominent columnists, correspondents, and anchors do not admit it—nor should they—it is likely that most agree: Simpson has committed two murders...
...Alan Dershowitz, who zipped into Los Angeles in his Lear jet, and then was uncharacteristically quiet, will emerge from hiding, and anchors and correspondents will scrupulously report all the defense arguments, while priding themselves on their balance and fairness...
...The fall of the mighty was a central theme of classical Greek tragedy . . . and it became the spine of Elizabethan tragedy," the Times said...
...News & World Report all ran cover photos of Mrs...
...Eventually the troubled soul must stop to confront the demons that have been in pursuit...
...mplicit in Quindlen's column, meanwhile, was the notion that Simpson was guilty...
...The Times, however, was reaching...
...If innocent he is badly muddled, and if guilty he is beneath contempt...
...the press from the start...
...Surely Simpson had to be suffering from secret afflictions...
...Presumably they were afraid to...
...This cover, with the simple nonjudgmental headline "An American Tragedy," seemed the right choice...
...0 bviously, Simpson has some advantages...
...The press was hostile toward him from the start, in part because in a sensitive age, it finds rape less socially acceptable than murder...
...People magazine ran a notable cover story—"The O.J...
...Perhaps Simpson had never been able to fill the voids, much less change his skin tone, or confront the demons...
...Frank Rich wrote on the op-ed page of the Times that by darkening Simpson's face, Time had sent him "back to the ghetto...
...In her 48 The American Spectator September 1994 column in the Times, Anna Quindlen chided those who felt sorry for him, and said the real victim was Nicole Brown Simpson...
...Benjamin Chavis of the NAACP was more vitriolic...
...The defense team is claiming, of course, that the press already has convicted Simpson, and that it is impossible for him to get a fair trial...
...It probably was, and you wonder what it made of it...
...Certainly there have been exceptions, and Simpson is not necessarily pictured as nice...
...It darkened the mug shot of Simpson that had been released by the Los Angeles Police Department, and used it on its cover...
...The day after he was taken into custody, William C. Rhoden, a sports columnist at the New York Times, wrote about the burdens on famous black athletes: Money and notoriety based on physical prowess can never fully fill certain voids, heal old scars, change skin tone, straighten hair, change any of those intrinsic qualities...
...On the "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" the next night, the essayist Anne Taylor Fleming said there might even be an "analogue to the Anita Hill thing...
...He is serving a three-year sentence, and will not be released until next year...
...There was a hint of what was to come right there...
...Former Attorney General Richard Thornburg even told Larry King that the whole world was watching...
...But no other publication seemed to pick up the story, and probably that was just as well...
...They found, the Post said, that he was "cowardly, oversexed, immature, tenacious, unpredictable and surly...
...Medea howled out her pain, and took responsibility for murdering her children...
...Polls by both Newsweek and CNN found that most black Americans believe Simpson cannot get a fair trial...
...Jesse Jackson and the Rev...
...Even the cheesiest publications have been hesitant to exploit the fact that he had a mixed marriage...
...Simpson case is gripping, and that there has never been anything quite like it before: a double murder and its aftermath played out in real time on television...
...After Nicole Simpson's piteous 911 call was disclosed, the network news programs and major publications all ran pieces on domestic violence...
...Posturing defense attorneys and other sympathizers to the contrary, Simpson has not had a bad press...
...Robert L. Shapiro, Simpson's lead counsel, once wrote an article entitled "Using the Media for Your Advantage...
...When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died at age 64, she was eulogized for having lived the last years of her life with dignity, grace and discretion, and successfully raising two children...
...Simpson may or may not be a `hero' to individual citizens, but as one who was given great gifts and has been brought to a grim pass by either fate or frailty, he fits the pattern that lurks in our ancestral memory...
...They may pretend it does not influence their coverage, butgiven the chance they extol it...
...Newsweek was right when it called Simpson "race neutral...
...Quindlen was right about that, although in her feminist zeal to turn the murder into a plea for battered wives, she forgot about Robert Goldman, who had been left as dead as Nicole Simpson...
...Either way, he is not a tragic figure...
...Indeed, the idea that the Simpson case was a "tragedy" would go on to suffuse much of the press coverage...
...When Simpson finally gave himself up at his house in California, all the network anchors went on air in New York, not adding much with their commentary, but exalting the event by their presence...
...A redemptive reason had to be found, and almost immediately one was...
...Simpson wrote a self-pitying letter, and then fled in a Ford Bronco...
...Tyson had a further disadvantage...
...The case is cited in law schools as the classic example inwhich pretrial publicity was used to reverse a conviction...
...Meanwhile, the old rationale of spouse abuse was dropped...
...but that depressing finding reflects cultural paranoia more than anything real, and it is to be devoutly hoped that Chavis, as well as the Rev...
...He was never seen as ambiguous, interesting, or worthy of much pity...
Vol. 27 • September 1994 • No. 9
