OJ is the national news media’s original sin. In 1994, we had a debate over national health care and a crisis in North Korea. And yet, CNN – the international gold standard for news, the channel that was in China long before and long after the June 4 slaughter, the channel that put three guys in a hotel in Baghdad while bombs rained down and fitted one of them with $100,000 sewn in a leather jacket to bribe his way out if needed – chose to spend literally every single day in live gavel-to-gavel coverage of a celebrity trial. In doing so, they lent their prestige and authority to the idea that this sideshow was something worthy of the kind of coverage given to outbreaks of war.
That summer, CNN destroyed news. You can draw a straight line from OJ to our current state, where “cable news” is nothing of the sort and “reality” television is the farthest things from reality imaginable. Now people actually think a bunch of yowling harpies or two screaming spittle-flecked morons equals news. Talking about what happened gets precedence over what happened. The fate of a bunch of coked-out sluts or some adorable missing moppet from another country leads the news. And now, the media totters on the brink of orgasm because they might get another crack at the whole OJ trial, with a whole new cast of characters and the irresistible lure of vengeance and retribution for having screwed it up the first time.
No. No, no, no, a thousand times no. Anybody who seriously considers themselves in the “news” business should want to vomit at the mere idea of devoting column inches or airtime to this copious horseshit. We. Are. At. WAR. Remember how September 11, 2001 was supposed to be the end of our frivolity and shallowness, how irony was dead and we would be devoted to the sincere and the serious? Well, it didn’t happen, and this is proof.
It’s not often I say this, but I mean it: if you disagree with me at all about this, keep it to yourself. If you seriously think OJ is important, worthy of news coverage, that it’s anything other than proof of our long slide into the abyss, then shut your mouth about it, bury it down deep, and never speak of it again, because if you honestly think it’s news, we cannot be friends. Period. Paragraph. The End. “I love OJ News” = “SHUT UP OR PISS OFF.”
AMEN.