* Nah, the Fatty Arbuckle trial was just as big – if not bigger – back in the 1920s. It sold vast forests’ worth of scandal sheets.
There was no doubt that Arbuckle savagely raped that woman (with, among other things, a champagne bottle and a long, jagged piece of ice). He tore her insides apart – ruptured her bladder. She died the next day.
Despite his denials, there were numerous witnesses who testified that he got her drunk, then dragged her up to his hotel room to have his way with her. (They were at a crowded party at a hotel.) He’d been going after her for some time, and he finally got her.
The first two juries deadlocked; the third returned an acquittal after a few minutes’ deliberation and then lined up for autographs.
Television news was once a lot more serious-minded and professionally-presented (whether it was “better” depends on your ideological perspective) than it is now. But that was not meant to last.
The Cronkite-Huntley/Brinkley era of the ’60s and ’70s was an aberration – the high-water mark of “serious” mainstream American journalism. The two networks were a virtual monopoly, gorging on a smorgasbord of national advertising revenues. (ABC was not fully competitive, especially in news, until the mid- to late-’70s.) They could afford to maintain vast worldwide news-gathering organizations.
Paley and Sarnoff took pains not to come across as stereotypical money-grubbing Jews – they wanted to make gobs of money, yes, but they also wanted to show off how classy they were. They also wanted to keep the FCC – one of whose commissioners famously denounced the prime-time landscape as a “vast wasteland” – off their backs. The easiest way to do that was by putting Cronkite on the air every night and saying, “See, we’re as respectable as anybody!”
They were utterly unlike someone like Larry Tisch, who took over CBS and dismembered it in the late ’80s. Tisch destroyed the news division and nearly destroyed the sports division, as well – during his tenure, CBS lost the rights to the NBA, the MLB, and, most disastrously, the NFL.
(Shortly after Fox outbid CBS for the NFC contract, ending 40 years of the NFC on CBS, Rupert Murdoch bought an independent company that owned a number of big-city CBS affiliates – all NFC markets. This double-barreled punch – losing pro football *and* many high-rated local stations that provided powerful lead-ins – was a staggering blow that left the network an also-ran for years. Even after CBS snagged the AFC away from NBC in ’98, it took a few more years – and new shows called CSI and Survivor – for the prime-time ratings to show any signs of life.)
Everyone remembers the hard-hitting Murrow documentaries of the ’50s*, but the nightly news back then was typified by easygoing John Cameron Swayze’s cheerful “Let’s go hopscotching around the world for headlines!” It wasn’t until the ’60s, when CBS and NBC expanded their evening newscasts to half an hour, that the daily news operations became something more than a joke.
*Even Murrow did Person to Person, a frothy interview show.
* It’s often pointed out that Nicole Brown was in life everything a middle class black woman would hate. Well. Nicole was not going to be liked by middle class white women either.
Something not often mentioned is that O.J. was still married to his first wife Marguerite when he took up with Nicole and Marguerite was pregnant with her and O.J.’s third child.
Woman I know always tell me any woman stupid enough to go with a married man deserves what happens, maybe not being murdered, but it won’t turn out well.
And Nicole’s parents encouraged her to go with the married O.J. Simpson. The Browns weren’t looked upon with much sympathy by white people in my experience. They still wanted Simpson found guilty.
* For Nicole’s parents, its always been about the money. OJ was their meal ticket and he set a number of them up quite comfortably post-NFL retirement in various endeavors.
Even when he was found guilty in the civil trial, they fought tooth and nail to get their hands on the millions of dollars to get whatever money they thought was due them. Remember, it was Nicole’s parents who tried to talk her out of divorcing OJ because they saw their gravy train coming to an end when she left.
So basically Nicole supported her family during her life, and if they ever do receive the money from the civil case, she will be supporting her family in her death. At least Denise has stopped attempting to go on TV every chance she can get to try and get her hands on the money because its not going to happen. OJ doesn’t have that kind of money anymore, so the extended Brown family will have to get honest paying jobs and not use their dead sister as a ploy to get money.
If they truly had cared about Nicole, they never would’ve encouraged their daughter/sister to go with him.
* O.J. was enormously popular with the sports media. He was always cooperative and willing to be interviewed and this had a lot to do with his favorable public image. The one thing known for sure about his relationship with teammates is that by 1977 the Bills players were glad to see him gone.
This is according to Larry Felser, long time Buffalo writer and Sporting News columnist. The Bills probably enjoyed the reflected glory of playing with the Great O.J. Simpson for a while but something like that eventually wears thin.
* Some impressions:
* Federal welfare reform was passed soon after (the GOP’s last act off assertion before full-on cuckservatism set in); wonder if black misbehavior in so jubilantly celebrating the verdict hardened some hearts
* distinctly remember a struck jury member- professional-looking black guy- having a small, adopted white child on his arm while talking to reporters
* Howard Stern (God bless ‘im) for years after ran a schtick where he or one of his ambush reporters would ask a black celebrity if they though OJ did it; I cannot recall a single one willing to admit OJ’s guilt, though several were so visibly discomfited it was obvious they were caught in a lie
* liberalism was still not SJW-overrun, and some outposts (NEW REPUBLIC, which of course had pre-existing bones to pick with black activists over quotas, Israel, Crown Heights riots, etc.- but several others as well, I think) had the decency to be embarrassed by the outcome
* LUV, LUV, LUV how sh!tlibs keep telling us- but always retroactively!- how we deserve to be outlaws in our own country, and any violence or crime directed at us is always just retaliation for the sins of our society, but in the meantime are more than happy to partake in all the amenities of said exploitative society; like how America had it coming to it on 9/11, but on 9/10 were more than happy to rub shoulders with all those New Yorkers later burned, crushed, or blown to death while going to see Lion King on Broadway.
* Christopher Caldwell wrote a terrific review of Bugliosi’s book and brought out two legal points I remember.
1. Garcetti threw the case by ruling out the death penalty for political reasons. This eliminated the incentive for the Juice to plead guilty. Also, jurors in capital cases can be rejected if the D.A. can raise doubts about their willingness to implement the death penalty. That is an important method that prosecutors use to get the church ladies off the jury.
2. Barry Scheck was playing with fire by basing the defense on doubts about D.A analysis since he has made it his life’s work using DNA evidence to get the wrongfully convicted out of jail. I guess, fortunately for Project Innocence, DNA is so overwhelmingly useful for prosecutors that they never raise doubts about exonerations based on decades old DNA evidence.
* Dr Bennet Omalu, portrayed in the movie “Concussion”, has stated that it’s his firm belief that OJ has CTE and that much of his volatile behavior was due to that. Also, OJ was paying his ex-wife $10,000 p/mo in child support which might have set him to thinking about how to remove this burden upon him, particularly in view of the fact that she was dating other men freely, all on his dime.
* I remember at the time of the trial wondering if this was a case of “‘roid rage”. At the time Simpson was involved in making an exercise video and it is also known that the suffered from arthritis, so he might have been taking some steroidal anti-inflammatory drug for it. I know that even the relatively mild and common steroid prednisone can cause mood changes and behavior changes. (I have had to use the drug myself.). If not that, then perhaps cocaine, or an admixture.
* Ken Kesey said it sounded like cocaine and steroids.
* The cocaine/steroid angle sounds right. My brother was a prosecuting attorney for 12 years. He said that he could sense cocaine-fueled crimes because they so often involved senseless and extreme violence … absolutely over the edge. I would appear that the OJ case was one of these … manic RAGE!
* There could’ve been post-concussive brain trauma as well. Odds are that he has it, to some degree. Makes a lot of people paranoid, impulsive, and potentially violent.
* Several years ago then Philadelphia Assistant District Attorney (and now defense attorney) Jack McMahon (who is a very colorful character) gave a taped seminar to the office’s younger Assistant District Attorneys to explain the strategy of jury selection for prosecutors:
It is naturally full of real talk. It caused a bit of a row when a subsequently elected District Attorney (Lynn Abraham) released the video.
It probably tracks with Bugliosi’s views but McMahon holds that you don’t want intelligent or educated people because they try to apply their intelligence to legal concepts like “reasonable doubt” and therefore tend to be riskier.
