The spectator mentality that riveted the nation's attention to the O.J. Simpson saga in 1994 and 1995 has since become an intrinsic part of the American fabric, the Associated Press reports. Simpson's death on Wednesday from cancer has turned attention back to the "trial of the century" in which the former football star and actor was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and a man who was visiting her, Ronald Goldman. In 1994, everyday real-time, wall-to-wall coverage was still emerging. The nation — and its media — are far more fragmented now. Rarely these days do Americans gather around the virtual campfire for a common experience; instead, small brush fires draw niche crowds in virtual corners for equally intense, but smaller, common experiences. “The media we consume is much more diffuse now. It’s so rare that we’re all glued to the same spectacle,” said Danielle Lindemann, author of the 2022 book “True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us.” “In 1994 we were watching our television sets and following along with news coverage,” Lindemann, a professor of sociology at Lehigh University, said in an email. “But there wasn’t that parallel discourse happening via social media.”
The Simpson case marked not only a milestone in news coverage of criminal cases but also of the starkly different perceptions of justice held by Black and white Americans. To counter extensive physical evidence tying Simpson to the murders, his defense lawyers effectively put the Los Angeles Police Department on trial in front of a mostly Black jury. For many Black Americans who felt their interactions with police and the courts had produced unjust results, the acquittal stemmed from "a sense that it’s only justice for a rich Black man to get off when a rich white man would,” said John Baick, a professor of history at Western New England University. In the end, the case provided an American moment like no other, and an interlude that contained so much of what American culture is and was becoming. From the old, weird America, it got the obsession with violent true crime and its quirky cast of film noir villains and heroes, not to mention the tragedy and the whodunit. And it was a teaser trailer of the emerging, fragmenting internet culture that would, in a few years, give us smartphones, social media, reality-TV saturation and live coverage of just about everything.