The Media Get Juiced

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 18, 2007 9:16 AM

I was having flashbacks yesterday.

Did O.J. do it? Is he guilty? Is he being railroaded? Is he a moron? Did the stuff belong to him?

I spent a good chunk of my life between 1994 and 1997 writing and yakking about the Juice--a guy who I once rooted for, when I was a college student in Buffalo and he broke the 2,000-yard barrier for the Bills. The brutal knifing of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman (a crime whose perpetrators Simpson is still ostensibly seeking) took over American society to a degree that, even now, seems difficult to comprehend.

I remember writing about that cultural watershed when the New York Times quoted the National Enquirer on the O.J. case. I remember, no joke, when the New York Post ran a story on Marcia Clark changing her hairstyle to a "softer do." I remember the talent-free sidekick Kato Kaelin getting a radio show. I remember "NBC Nightly News" doing two and sometimes three O.J. pieces a night. I remember being unable to watch a talk show, night after night, without guests yelling at each other about the Simpson case. I remember that when O.J., post-verdict, canceled an NBC interview with Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric at the last minute, it was a front-page story for me.

We'll get to my report on the Las Vegas heist--excuse me, the alleged heist--in a second, but I think it's fair to say that O.J. isn't real popular on the blogs.

The Right State: "Nothing new there. O.J. is a sociopath bent on self destruction. He should have been convicted in the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in 1994. The police had all kinds of forensic evidence linking the former football star to the murders, but alas, the incompetent twelve strike again. The jury bought the 'race card' put forward by Simpson's attorneys and so they let a killer walk free.

"This time O.J. may not be so lucky, because his own words will convict him. By his own admission, Simpson broke into a hotel room with the intent to retrieve items he believes were stolen from him."

Eviltwin2: "When the Robert Blake trial went on, I observed to many folks that one would think that Blake would have learned something from OJ: hire professionals. Whacking a waiter and an ex-spouse are not do it yourself projects, hire pro's. [Apparently] OJ learned this and did hire pro's this time, but his desire to micro-manage led him to be on the scene as well, hence the seven felony charges."

Doodlebug: "Well . . . it looks like after all this time, OJ is going to be headed to prison after all. I had a chance to hear him exploding on the audio tape going around. It sure sounds like he has a big-time temper -- even if he had a reason to be upset. Enough of a temper to kill someone if the conditions were right? Well, I won't go there -- but it will be rather ironic if after all this time he is booked for armed robbery."

Here's my take, with an assist from my colleague Sonya Geis at Camp O.J. in Las Vegas:

Moments after President Bush announced Michael Mukasey as his nominee for attorney general yesterday, the cable networks jilted him for an old flame.

O.J. was back. O.J. was proclaiming his innocence. O.J. was doing the perp walk. The Juice was under arrest, and television was magically transported back to the mid-1990s, when all of America argued about every facet of the double-murder case.

"This promises to be the biggest fall series of the new season," said Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University. "The double homicide was a tragedy of mythological proportions. The sequel seems to have come back as a sitcom."

In a heartbeat, a small battalion of media types descended on Las Vegas, where O.J. Simpson was charged with six felony counts Sunday after an alleged hotel-room robbery that he described as reclaiming sports souvenirs that were rightfully his.

"It's the story that just doesn't go away," Fox News host Greta Van Susteren, who has interviewed Simpson several times, said by phone from Las Vegas. Van Susteren was part of a corps of little-known lawyers who rode the murder case to television fame.

"This is a routine criminal case in many ways," she said yesterday, calling Simpson's latest legal scrape "certainly disheartening." The murder charges should play no role in this investigation, Van Susteren said, even though "99.9 percent think he's guilty" of killing his ex-wife Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman in 1994.

There was, however, a racial split. A 2004 poll by NBC News found that 87 percent of whites, but only 29 percent of African Americans, believed Simpson was guilty of murder.

In the media encampment outside the Regional Justice Center in Nevada's largest city, dozens of journalists, with camera crews and satellite trucks in tow, staked out their turf yesterday under a baking desert sun. Lawn chairs were pulled up around card tables stocked with bottled water, sunblock and Triscuits. The atmosphere quickly took on the air of a reunion.

"O.J. Three!" CBS radio correspondent Steve Futterman cried when he spotted NBC reporter George Lewis standing on the courthouse steps. Both men had covered Simpson's criminal and civil trials.

Futterman held up three fingers. Lewis waved back with the same sign.

"I've been hearing from all the old crowd," Lewis said.

"It's like ESPN Classic out here," Futterman replied.

The most heavily covered robbery case in television history unfolded on the airwaves throughout the day. Fred Goldman, Ron's father, called in to "Good Morning America" and "Today." Attorneys and legal pundits -- Roy Black, MSNBC's Dan Abrams, CNN's Jeffrey Toobin -- offered instant analysis.

At a news conference outside the courthouse, a designated "media judge," Nancy Oesterle, surveyed the scene from behind sunglasses and ruled it a "media frenzy." She explained the procedures surrounding the arraignment, which was postponed until Wednesday.

Fox provided the greatest volume of coverage, putting pairs of dueling lawyers through their paces. Former prosecutor Monica Lindstrom said Simpson sounded "threatening" and "intimidating" on an audiotape of the incident, while defense lawyer Royce Russell countered: "How can you steal something that is already yours?"

By midafternoon, Fox was running an on-air banner saying, "O.J.: Mentally Ill or Just Arrogant?"

In many ways, Simpson's latest brush with the law is merely the manifestation of a media culture obsessed with celebrity and crime -- a culture that the former football player inadvertently helped inaugurate as news outlets went haywire after the killings. It is hard to overstate the degree to which his trials plunged the country into a racially charged maelstrom that set the tone for the subsequent media fixations with the likes of Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson and Natalee Holloway. Once television grasped the ratings gold in soap-opera investigations and prosecutions, even unknown victims, if they were white and attractive, could be transformed into celebrities.

All of the principals in the 1990s Simpson circus -- Johnnie Cochran, Marcia Clark, Lance Ito, Robert Shapiro, Kato Kaelin, Mark Fuhrman -- became at least mini-celebrities. (Fuhrman was back on Fox yesterday, while Clark, now a correspondent for "Entertainment Tonight," said on the show's Web site that "they might actually nail him this time.") People argued over the low-speed Bronco chase, the glove that didn't seem to fit, the apparently bumbling prosecution, the judge's loss of control as lawyers and witnesses played to the cameras. A made-to-order tabloid tale, with a trial televised by CNN (then the only general news channel on cable), became daily fodder for major newspapers and evening newscasts. In perhaps the most surreal moment, the 1997 civil verdict against Simpson shared split-screen billing with President Bill Clinton's State of the Union address.

Now, however, the line between "legitimate" and sensational news has long since been erased. Even the stuffiest news outlets cover the antics of Paris and Britney, featured on a "Girls Gone Wild" Newsweek cover. Unlike in 1994, there are three cable news networks, thousands of online news sites and millions of blogs to stoke any story. Over the weekend, it was the gossip site TMZ.com that obtained the expletive-filled audiotape of the confrontation between Simpson's group and sports memorabilia dealer Alfred Beardsley. TMZ also obtained an exclusive interview with Beardsley, who says he was robbed at gunpoint.

Little wonder, then, that the Simpson arrest made not just the front page of yesterday's New York Post ("O.J. IN A CAN") but The Washington Post's as well.

But will O.J. Redux remain boffo at the box office?

"He's such a '90s phenomenon," said Julia Allison, editor at large for Star magazine, who was in high school during the murder trial. "If you look at who we're covering now, it's all young, sexy girls. The media are assuming they'll get the ratings with Simpson that they used to get in the '90s, and I wonder if they will."

But there is another element driving the story, in Allison's view: "No one likes O.J. Simpson, except apparently for the posse of ne'er-do-wells that follows him around."

Thompson, the Syracuse professor, sees the story line as one of unfinished business.

The Simpson murder case "was this big, stinking deal, and never had its final act," he said. "The civil trial didn't provide a sense of closure. If you listen to the coverage, there's almost this undisguised glee that he could be looking at 100 years in prison."

This morning, the New York Post goes big with the audiotape:

" 'Don't let nobody out this room. Mother---!' a crazed O.J. Simpson raged as he and his gun-toting cohorts burst into a hotel room to confront alleged sports-memorabilia thieves, according to tapes released yesterday.

"Simpson pal Thomas Riccio, who apparently set up the meeting-turned-wild melee, taped Simpson going berserk against collectors Alfred Beardsley and Bruce Fromong. 'Think you can steal my [expletive] and sell it?' Simpson is heard screaming Thursday night in a room at the Palace Station Hotel & Casino as his armed pals menaced the two men."

Speaking of 1990s time warps: Hillary Clinton pushing a health-care plan? She's just unveiled "a $110 billion-a-year plan that would require all Americans to have insurance and give them a range of plan options . . .

"Mrs. Clinton said she would pay for the plan partially by ending Republican-backed tax cuts for people earning $250,000 or more, as well as by netting billions of dollars in savings by reorganizing the health care system," says the New York Times. "She also said she would press insurance companies and drug companies to focus on providing lower cost care -- while at the same time, she said, she would ban insurance companies from turning down people for insurance because of health status or pre-existing health conditions . . .

"Unlike her earlier attempt, Mrs. Clinton is not proposing a new government bureaucracy. Nor would her new plan strip people of their current health insurance -- a fear that helped sink her 1993 and 1994 endeavor."

Adds the L.A. Times: "Clinton went out of her way to say that she had learned the lessons of her earlier failure, pledging to do less mandating and more negotiating. And there was some evidence of that at work in Monday's presentation. Clinton repeatedly said that Americans who are satisfied with their current health insurance coverage need not make any change, something that the earlier Clinton plan did not promise . . . In addition, she and her aides left key elements open to bargaining."

So how is AG nominee Michael Mukasey going down with the right?

"Some of my fellow conservatives will be disappointed that the nominee won't be former Solicitor General Ted Olson," says Bill Kristol.

"While it's unfortunate that the first thing many conservatives will hear about Mukasey is that his home-state senator Chuck Schumer has praised him, that shouldn't disqualify him. Knowing Mukasey wasn't on Bush's Supreme Court short list, Schumer felt free to list him a few years ago as an acceptable 'consensus' candidate for the Court. And in fact, I for one don't know enough about Mukasey's constitutional views to be sure I'd recommend him for a lifetime Court appointment. Nor would he perhaps be the best pick for AG at the beginning of a term, with hundreds of court appointments and other personnel and policy decisions in a wide range of areas ahead. But this is an appointment for the last fifteen months of an administration whose basic policies are set and which has few judges left to appoint."

Captain Ed gets on the team:

"While an argument can be made for having an argument, an equal and better argument can be made for quietly working for a candidate who will not inspire immediate partisanship. For one thing, Justice is a mess, and a smooth transition will make its recovery more quick. Also, having these partisan fights for the sake of having them does damage to political discourse and in the end achieves little more than increased rancor -- especially if other candidates will push for the same policies and objectives. That's more a knock on Congress and the Democrats, whose knee-jerk opposition to Olson is both substanceless and insulting. In the present climate, and with the administration rightly focusing its political strength on keeping the mission going on Iraq, it makes more sense to give a little on this appointment as a balance."

The Nation's John Nichols sees a victory of sorts:

"Mukasey's not a perfect pick, and perhaps not even an acceptable selection. But he is a better nominee than Ted Olson, if only because his background suggests that he might take seriously the fundamental task of restoring the Department of Justice.

"So there will be no nomination of Olson, and no formal vote by the Judiciary Committee or the full Senate to confirm the most ardent champion of the right-wing Federalist Society's campaign to warp the federal judiciary and the nation's law-enforcement apparatus.

"But no one should mistake what has happened: Olson has been blocked by the Senate. That is good news for the Justice Department, for the rule of law and for the Republic."

At Firedoglake, Jane Hamsher smacks down Elizabeth Edwards (whose father was a career naval officer) for daring to say of MoveOn's attack on Gen. David H. Petraeus: "Someone who's spent their life in the military doesn't deserve 'General Betray Us.' "

"You're a smart woman. You of all people should know about the asymmetrical intimidation problem that Paul Krugman talks about -- the one where the media is afraid to go after Rudy Guiliani for claiming he's a rescue worker, but they'll try to demolish your husband over a haircut because they know that they'll get swarmed by the right wing noise machine for the former and pay no price for the latter. That's how it works.

"So I was really disappointed today to read at Taylor Marsh's place that you had joined with Diaper Dave Vitter and John 'McCarthy' McCain to attack MoveOn. We (and by that I mean the netroots) defend you when the MSM try to make your campaign a pi¿ata over stupid, insignificant stuff. When they try to say your race should end because of your illness, but don't say squat about Fred Thompson's lymphoma. We're your first line of defense, the only messaging machine that progressives have.

"So here's the rule. You never repeat right wing talking points to attack your own, ever."

I guess Elizabeth's candor is only appreciated when she's firing at Republicans? Didn't even Nancy Pelosi express reservations about the MoveOn ad?

Is it time for the McCain Comeback Narrative? Time's Jay Carney has a word of caution:

"John McCain has resurrected his campaign. He's still struggling financially, but he's stopped his slide in the polls and begun inching his way upward again. Building on a strong performance in the most recent GOP debate, McCain is riding his role as General Petraeus' most ardent supporter straight back into the hearts of some of the voters out there who still believe there's a way to prevail in Iraq. He also has a clever double entendre for a new campaign slogan -- 'No Surrender!'

"But if McCain's firmer-than-thou stance on the war is finally paying some dividends in a crowded Republican primary, it has also all but obliterated what was once an underlying rationale for McCain's nomination -- i.e., that his popularity among independents and wavering Democrats made him a formidable general election candidate. Back in 2000, when McCain used to say that he -- but not George W. Bush -- could 'beat Al Gore like a drum' in a general election match-up, he was almost certainly right. If McCain were to somehow win his party's nomination in 2008, his extreme hawkishness on Iraq would likely erase much of his old cross-over appeal."

Meanwhile, Fred Thompson has joined Giuliani, Romney and McCain in blowing off a PBS debate at a historically black college in Baltimore. Have they concluded that blacks don't vote in GOP primaries?

Hey -- Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, Tom Friedman and company have been liberated! The NYT is ending its unpopular experiment of charging 50 bucks a year for online access to its columnists.

The LAT looks at the dustup over Fox's Emmy coverage:

"Producers of Sunday's Emmy telecast bleeped best drama actress winner Sally Field in the midst of a controversial acceptance speech attacking U.S. involvement in Iraq.

" 'If mothers ruled the world, there wouldn't be any god -' she said when the sound went dead and the camera suddenly turned away from the stage so viewers would be distracted. Chopped off were the words 'god-damned wars in the first place.' (The phrase was not censored in the Canadian telecast.) . . .

"Backstage, in the press room later, Field told reporters, 'I would have liked to have said more four-letter words up there!' "

I can understand why an FCC-wary network would bleep a mild obscenity. I can't understand why Fox wouldn't let Field finish her antiwar sentence.