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June 17, 1999 |
O.J. Simpson, Mr. Higgins reported, was slumped down in his Bronco in the driveway of his home; we couldn't see him, from our helicopter-cam vantage point, but Mr. Higgins said he could. Was he still alive? Did he really have a gun? Was he pointing it at anyone? "I see O.J.," Mr. Higgins told Jennings. "He looks scared." Then he announced, "Baba Booey to y'all!" and cut out. "Baba Booey," we know now, is a Howard Stern catch phrase, and the call was a hoax. And with it, that anonymous pinhead became one of the great faceless figures of my internal historical chronology: contemporary media's equivalent of the itchy trigger finger at the battle of Lexington or the unknown Chinese civilian who stared down the tanks at Tiananmen Square. Peter Jennings was not the first news anchor to be Baba-Booeyed. But in that moment, when one Stern soldier pantsed the ABC anchor on national television, in the middle of the defining media episode of the decade, the balance of power in America changed. It was a dumb, unoriginal and arguably racist prank (the caller was using what the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz charitably described as "an obviously fake ghetto accent"). It was significant, in fact, precisely because it was so stupid, so risible from the first syllable. Because it was so obvious. Somebody should have known better, I'm sure you were thinking, if you watched it. Except somebody didn't. The call summed up, for better and worse, the media environment that would come after it and crystallized much of what had come before. If it was the moment that I became a media critic, I don't mean that in any momentous, epiphanic sense. It was also was the moment that caller became a media critic. It was the moment you did. "We are at moments like that," Jennings would later good-humoredly say, "reduced to roughly the same level as that of the audience." But the media, this time around, did not get back up. James Poniewozik's column appears in Media, every Monday and Thursday Find books on O.J. Simpson at BARNES & NOBLE
Media critics do not generally use "O.J." as a shorthand for anything good. On our eternally downward-trending graphs, "post-O.J." means "after everything was shot to hell" -- after, that is, the news degenerated into a nightly cavalcade of arguments and shock news. The news-chopper mania, the "World's Greatest Police Chases," the selling of stories to the tabloids. I don't think that's particularly true, or particularly useful: All that stuff was manifest before the murders and would have continued with or without Brentwood's controversial resident (or, for that matter, Brentwood's next controversial resident). That "post-O.J." mentality results from a wrongheaded, patrician assumption that the Simpson case was an overblown trifle played up for ratings. It was played up for ratings, of course -- there's no denying the Dancing Itos -- but just as the trial convinced many people that the Los Angeles Police Department had framed a guilty man, it also showed that a story could be both trumped up and truly important. People may have been interested in the case because O.J. was a celebrity (a relatively faded one by 1994, though we tend to forget that now), but they became involved in it because it captured real and important issues. There was race, of course -- a subject so successfully ignored this decade that even the Los Angeles riot couldn't make it a campaign issue -- but also class, money and celebrity, and, entwined with all of them, power. The trial became a national checkup on the state of social mobility in America -- a national conversation, if an uncivil one, more comprehensive than any the Clinton administration has tried to arouse. What people realized about the case, and why it was far more significant than the media's tut-tutters recognize, was that the important thing would be not so much whether Simpson was found guilty as why. (Appropriately for our era of relative truth, we got two answers to the first question and several to the second.)
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