David Walsh Takes on the O.J. Simpson Trial

Three decades ago David Walsh wrote about the O.J. Simpson trial. As one might expect of him, he did not neglect what the extreme attention to the event indicated about American society--the idiotic worship of wealth and the "success" that is the euphemism for it, the cult of celebrity, the disconnect of the content of the media from real life, the evasion of pressing world problems, the disorientation of much of the public. However, one of those pieces seem to me particularly worth mentioning as an antidote to the nonsense about how the country was "captivated" by those events of which we are now getting so much. As Walsh observed, "[t]he absorption with these events is largely created or at least manipulated by the media," all as the media endeavors "to implicate the public in the" essential depravity of that absorption--claiming that it is the public's obsession that is keeping the media "fixated on the Simpson trial" in a crisis-ridden world. While the real driver was "the element of calculation" on the media's part, using the "case . . . as a black hole sucking popular attention away from the potentially explosive" world situation--just as it had so many other similar cases before in those years of tabloid inanity as the dominant feature of the evening news (Amy Fisher, Tonya Harding, etc., etc.).

For his part Walsh suggested that "the effort to keep the public absorbed by 'real-life' melodrama is doomed to fail," with "the Simpson case . . . perhaps the last gasp of this sort of mindlessness." Alas, if it can seem that no really comparable trial has had quite the same hold on the mediasphere since, the tabloid mentality nevertheless prevailed, infecting political life ever since, with the impeachment of Bill Clinton a signal moment in that process, as more broadly the media, news media included, has never stopped trying to keep the public absorbed by "'real-life' melodrama," with the process growing so intense and absurd and grotesque as to make the depravity of the '90s look arcadian by comparison with where American culture stands today.