How the hysteria over the O.J. Simpson trial set the tone of our current media landscape

In June of 1994, there was no bigger story on TV than the O.J. Simpson case.

Everyone was tuned into CNN's Larry King Live waiting for an update on the whereabouts of Simpson. Then a few minutes later, the TV flashed to the infamous white Ford Bronco car chase. 

Simpson went from being a NFL Hall of Famer and a popular sportscaster to America's most notorious man.

Simpson died last week at the age of 76 to little fanfare as his legacy had almost nothing to do with his football or his acting career. He is most remembered for one of the most infamous murder trials of all time. One that shaped our current rumour mill, reality TV and true crime obsessed world.

Writers Eric Harvey, Jael Richardson and David Dennis Jr. join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud on Commotion to reflect on the sensationalism of Simpson's trial and how it pushed conversations about race, privilege and domestic violence into the national spotlight.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast on your favourite podcast player.

LISTEN | Today's episode on YouTube:

Elamin: David, what are your most lasting memories from that moment?   

David: There were three moments in my K-through-12 life when they wheeled the TV out for the news. 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the O.J. Simpson trial. And for the O.J. trial, they wheeled that bad boy into the lunchroom. It was in the lunchroom in the cafeteria during lunch. That's how big this was. Everybody who passed through lunch saw this O.J. thing happening. I also distinctly remember, when I was in fourth grade, my third grade teacher came and sat by us at the lunch table and debated me about if O.J. was guilty or not.  

Jael: It's so funny because I actually feel like it was the beginning of memes. I was 14, so maybe it was just the beginning for me. But I remember the Ford Bronco T-shirts that would be for sale all the time. I remember "the juice is loose." There were all these slogans that were going around at the time. 

And when I was in high school, in grade nine or 10, when the trial was going on, I wore my hair down intentionally and slid headphones up my shirt and under my hair so that I could listen, I don't know, on a Walkman? I don't even know what I was listening to. My teacher wouldn't wheel the TV in and so I had to come up with my own plan for watching and listening to it live because I knew my dad would be watching it. I was like, "I need to know what's happening when it happens."

Elamin: Before I move on, can I get you, Jael, to tell me where you were when the verdict dropped?  

Jael: That's where I was when the verdict dropped. I was sitting in my classroom, my grade 10 English class, headphones under my hair, totally absorbed. The rest of the class is doing a writing exercise. It was a wild time.

Elamin: Eric, you put out a book in 2021 called Who Got the Camera, which looks at the rise of reality-based entertainment through the lens of gangster rap, but also TV shows like Cops and major news events like the L.A. Riots and the O.J. trial. Can you talk about the factors that made this O.J. trial such a giant pop culture powder keg moment?

Eric: After O.J.'s death, you saw a lot of people saying, "O.J. invented a particular moment. The O.J. trial invented this new tabloid media, cable news, 24/7." And it didn't. That was about 10 years earlier when this whole thing started. But the O.J. trial was this acme of this moment. 

Starting in the late '80s, you have daytime talk shows — Oprah, Geraldo and Donahue — they were dominating the daytime media landscape. And one of the things that they did was they were relitigating civil rights using this transformed media landscape as the backdrop. 

Walking up and down the aisles with all these average people talking about their hot takes on what's going on. Oprah goes to Forsyth County, Georgia, where no Black person lived for 75 years. She did a whole show from there. Donahue had David Duke on his show platforming David Duke. And Geraldo Rivera sat a white supremacist next to a civil rights activist. Then everything turned into a big wrestling match. And this was all in '86, '87, '88.

This was the exact same time when Public Enemy and N.W.A were coming out of Compton and Long Island and were waging war against the same kind of institutionalised racism in an outlandish and combative way. At the same time, this is the tail end of the Reagan era law and order culture that permeated popular media. So you got the true crime genre exploding again. True crime dates back to Joseph Pulitzer. We had Cops, America's Most Wanted, A Current Affair and Dateline.

Elamin: David, I think now if a celebrity was charged with murdering their wife and their history of abuse is made public, they would be instantly disowned. But it's wild to look back at the fact that O.J. himself became a site for controversy. He became something of a folk hero to some people, because if you watch the footage of the white Bronco chase, you see some people on the overpasses cheering him on. How do you explain that to someone in 2024?

David: This is an idea about who we dislike. And as much as we did not really rock with O.J. and knew he didn't rock with us. We really were rooting against the same system in L.A. that was doing a lot of unspeakable and still is doing a lot of unspeakable crimes against Black folks. So that's really what the cheering was about. 

Elamin: Jael, what did you make of the way that the trial was used for laughs on basically every comedy show at the time?

Jael: I grew up in a quite privileged home. I grew up around a lot of white people and not a lot of Black people at times, both in my friendship circle and my family circle. And I remember at that time the difference between talking about O.J. in the house when we were watching the trial and hearing about it on TV from people like Norm MacDonald, hearing neighbours and other people talk about it. And it's the first time I remember this discomfort with what was happening and something I couldn't quite define, I couldn't quite explain. 

I didn't find the jokes funny in the same way that my white friends found them funny, and I didn't quite know how to talk about it. For me, now, looking at things that were unveiled in 2020 and looking back, I can see what was happening. There was an understanding. But O.J. was a really hard character to have those conversations about because he was terrible. 

It was the first time I remember questioning police and questioning the justice system and doing it in that way. And I think O.J. just made it really complicated.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Stuart Berman