Remembering the Coverage of the O.J. Simpson Trial

The NBC headline regarding O.J. Simpsons' death ran "O.J. Simpson, former NFL star whose trial captivated the country, dies of cancer at 76."

NBC is not alone in reporting the matter as such, the use of the term "captivated" in this way a cliché of the current coverage, to be found in reporting of Mr. Simpson's death by outlets as varied as, besides fellow network news operations like ABC and CBS, the more staid newscast on PBS, newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to USA Today, and of course, entertainment publications such as The Hollywood Reporter.

My recollection of the actual events, which I trust infinitely more than I do NBC, and all those previously named outlets combined, is not of the Simpson trial "captivating" the country, but its being mercilessly inflicted on it by the lowest common denominator, hot button-pushing, tabloid trash-peddling scum of the mainstream media that people quite remote from reality admonish us for not respecting as the sole valid source of information about current events. In all that the public was captive not to its supposed fascination with the trial, but rather to the priorities of those occupying that media's commanding heights, who, contrary to those who may hopes some may harbor that the media have "learned something" since that fracas, have in the three decades since done little but disgrace themselves instead, as a glance at the headlines on our news pages shows--not only because of the manner in which they report the news, but the hard reality that the way they report it has left the world worse off, making the consistently horrifying character of the headlines before our eyes not a matter of their indisputable selectivity, but that finding horrors to shove before us has been so easy.