After more than 30 years of covering news in Los Angeles, I must tell you that L.A., is an industry town, and entertainment is the industry. To expect local journos to ignore that is unrealistic. Naive, even. And I was there when one of the biggest stories of all time was breaking. The O.J. Trial, that is. Or, if you prefer, “trials.” But his celebrity was just one part of it. There was so much more and it demanded unprecedented coverage.
We knew at the time that what we were doing, wall to wall non-stop coverage with a regular panel of expert pundits, was something new. I don’t think anybody realized that what we had started would be a trend on 7/24 cable channels for decades to come.
It may be difficult to believe, but at the time, only two outlets, Court TV and KTLA-TV, were carrying the pre-trial hearing(s) and then the trial wall to wall.
KTLA, was on cable and satellite systems across the country. Eventually Sky TV picked us up and we were on the air in Europe. And we did it without smartphones. I think I eventually got a fax at my desk in the courthouse. No laptop though, and I’m still not sure how I did what I did without the aid of a computer. It probably helped that we were breaking news minute by minute so there was no need to go online for additional information. It was coming from us. We were the news.
By the time the second trial started, the civil case in Santa Monica, I had finally gotten my hands on a laptop with wireless capability. My wife has compared it to being in an era that was transitioning from the horse and buggy to the automobile. I think she’s right. In fact, what we went through transitioning to computers might have been a little harder. And then The National Enquirer, starting beating us all. That, was never supposed to happen.
I doubt any of us realized that including breaking news from certain tabloids in our reporting was breaking new ground for giving the tabloids credibility they had never had. Thing is, we had to make a choice. The Tabloids were doing factual, valid stories that mattered. And they were paying for the information, something we mainstream journos would not do. Nevertheless, we ignored them at our own peril, which could mean missing a huge new part of the story. So some of us went along for the ride. Remember those photos of Simpson sitting at a shoeshine stand up in Canada wearing size 12 Bruno Maglis? KTLA, was the first tv outlet to get those photos. We got them from the Enquirer, because I was buddies with their reporter covering the trial in Santa Monica. I hadn’t paid anybody for information, I was just doing what I had to, to advance the story. And I trusted the reporter for the Enquirer. I can’t say if that would be the case today.
As for Simpson’s “slow speed pursuit” starting the trend of tv stations covering meaningless pursuits for years to come. Well, that’s true. That’s exactly what happened. However, to the best of my knowledge, it was a fever that lasted for a number of years and has since petered out? I can’t be sure, as I left SoCal in 2015, but I seem to recall fewer pursuits were being covered as the years went by. Here in the Baltimore area, only one of our four local tv stations even has a helicopter. The problem in L.A., was that the stations that carried the pursuits got huge numbers while tv stations that ignored them were crushed in the ratings race.
In retrospect, after 30 years, and as someone who was among the first journos to arrive at the murder scene and was then in the slow-speed pursuit and then covered both trials to the point of mental and physical exhaustion, it’s all true. The O.J. trials, perhaps the criminal trial most of all, changed everything, and not all for the better.
That said, I feel I have nothing to apologize for. We had a tiger by the tail. It was a story that never should have happened and was never going to end. Captain America, one of the greatest NFL running backs of all time, a nationally known good-guy movie star, had been charged with taking a knife and slaughtering two people, one of them his beautiful ex-wife, in one of the toniest neighborhoods of Los Angeles. And drugs may have been involved. And the City was just recovering from the Rodney King riots And Johnnie Cochran, a real pit bull in a courtroom, had put the LAPD on trial.
There was a joke running through the press room that O.J. Simpson, was “The guiltiest man ever to be framed.” That might be close to the truth.
We were captured by an irresistible force. Use any metaphor you want. We did the best we could and it was a privilege to be there and to call those people covering “The Trial of the Century” my colleagues and friends. It was monumental. Fallout, was inevitable. I have no regrets.