OJ Ruined Cable News
The Simpson case showed CNN, and eventually Fox and MSNBC, that news networks could retain an audience by talking about the same thing nonstop. Cable news never recovered.
The OJ Simpson criminal trial was a seminal event in a lot of ways. It gripped the country from the moment Simpson went on the lamb in his famous white Ford Bronco. It led to various reforms of the criminal justice system, including better police and crime lab procedures, and rules of evidence that allowed juries to hear the out of court statements of domestic violence victims fearing for their lives. It fed a racial debate that is seemingly never-ending.
But one of its underappreciated effects was that it changed cable news forever. Before the Simpson case, the basic business model of CNN was exactly what you might think: 24 hour news. CNN staffed bureaus in major American cities and all over the world, and formed relationships with local broadcasters, to create comprehensive newscasts that filled most of its programming time. The network then supplemented this backbone of newscasts with several news-related programs, such as Larry King Live (featuring interviews with newsmakers and celebrities), Moneyline (a business news program hosted by Lou Dobbs pre-his move into far right anti-immigration politics), Showbiz Today and Sports Tonight (Exactly What They Say on the Tin), and Crossfire, a 30 minute debate program usually featuring one guest from the “left” and one from the “right” debating the issues of the day.
Once the white Bronco made its meandering way along Southern California’s freeways on that fateful day in June 1994, this all changed. The nation was riveted by the chase, and CNN made the decision to cover Simpson’s pre-trial hearing, several days later, live gavel to gavel. That hearing lasted four days, and CNN surrounded the coverage with a large group of legal analysts to translate the court proceedings for its audience and add commentary. These attorney-analysts included Roger Cossack and Greta Van Susteren, who were later given their own legal affairs show, Burden of Proof, on the network.
Ratings soared, and CNN realized that it had a winning formula. Soon even CNN’s regularly-scheduled programming started to fill up with OJ material. Larry King moved his show to Los Angeles where the trial would be taking place and interviewed defense lawyers, witnesses and potential witnesses, and legal analysts every night. Crossfire devoted whole shows to Simpson trial-related topics. Eventually, when the trial started in January 1995, CNN devoted itself almost exclusively to the trial. Viewers could watch continuously, from CNN’s morning newscast, through the live trial coverage, and into its evening newscasts and talk shows, and experience nothing but footage from the OJ trial and analysis of the case. And they ate it up. CNN stayed on the OJ beat all the way through to the trial’s conclusion and verdict in October 1995. Meanwhile, you could barely find other stories on the network. For instance, war was raging in the Balkans, which traditionally would have been irresistible for CNN: it loved deploying its war correspondents like Christiane Amanpour to cover military conflict. But it was almost all OJ all the time, for months. It was like there was nothing else going on in the world.
This, I think, is the underappreciated turning point of American cable news. If you dislike Fox News and its influence on society (or you might be a conservative who dislikes MSNBC, or you might be of any ideology and dislike CNN), the OJ trial was where the Frankenstein’s monster of cable news first sat up on the gurney and opened his eyes.
The modern cable news formula is precisely cribbed from the OJ case. On any cable news network, editorial decisions as to what big story they want to cover today. Then, each news show discusses the same topic, with endless panels of analysts and little first-hand reporting. It doesn’t matter if they are discussing the coronavirus vaccine or the infrastructure bill, the formula is the same. It’s one topic, discussed over and over again, throughout the day. It doesn’t matter if you tune in to Brianna Keilar or Chris Cuomo, they are discussing the exact same issues, sometimes even with some of the same guests. Sometimes they will go “live” to one of their correspondents, but it will be for more analysis- perhaps Jim Acosta will pipe in from a live outdoor stand-up with additional analysis on the political impact of whatever the topic at hand is.
In many ways, Fox’s is the most pernicious version of this. It has been widely reported that a memo goes out at Fox setting out the issue of the day, often some meaningless cultural issue like liberals trying to cancel Dr. Seuss.
But it’s not harmless even when the OJ approach is applied to real issues. Analysis crowds out reporting, and most of the time there’s more than one important thing going on in the world. A person who watches CNN, or Fox, or MSNBC isn’t learning anything about the news. They are just watching a 24 hour talk show, often on a single subject.
And even worse, while they aren’t watching the news, they think they are. Indeed, CNN, especially, still has the reputation of being a straight newscast, even though it now broadcasts very little news.
The cost of this to the nation is incalculable. Cable news encourages its viewers to focus on whatever the outrage of the day is while not providing them with real information. It’s what The Rush Limbaugh show was, sometimes minus the ideological content. And then you wonder while so many of us go out and behave like a bunch of mini-Limbaughs, assuming everyone who disagrees with us is evil and that facts do not matter, online and out in the real world.