TV kept viewers hooked with jury selection that fall, through the trial’s start in January 1995, then through months of proceedings, carried gavel-to-gavel by numerous networks and recapped daily on numerous shows. “Here was a man who had transcended sports and even race, a guy who had achieved single-name status,” says Jack Ford, now CBS News Legal Analyst, who covered the trial for NBC News.
It was lurid, star-driven and racially charged, with elements of glitz, sex and domestic violence all wrapped in mystery and supercharged with who-will-win suspense. Endowed with cameras in the courtroom, this was the first big TV trial.
OJ SIMPSON FAMOUS PHOTO POLICE CHASW FULL
What followed was labeled the Trial of the Century, with TV perfectly poised to give it the full treatment, serving as its primary dispatcher and enabler. That’s when the hook was set for everything that followed.” “Everybody was watching it, live, wondering if O.J. “You didn’t dare turn away,” says Greta Van Susteren, now a Fox News Channel host, who became a legal analyst for CNN’s trial coverage.
More than 90 million Americans watched, thunderstruck, as TV helicopters tracked this beyond-bizarre motorcade along the freeways of Los Angeles, then, after some 90 minutes, witnessed Simpson surrender in the driveway of his Brentwood home. TV erupted in full force late in the afternoon of June 17, with Simpson (charged with the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman) the focus of a slow-speed police chase in his white Ford Bronco, apparently considering suicide en route.
0 kommentar(er)
