- OJ Simpson’s pursuit of the white Bronco and his subsequent murder trial fascinated America.
- It’s hard to say how many people watched this stuff live: think of the Super Bowl audience.
- It seems impossible to imagine another story that we would all watch together – because now we are all watching different things.
OJ Simpson brought America together.
Which is a strange thing to say about a man credibly accused of a vicious double murder.
But it’s also a reality: In 1994, when Simpson fled the police in his white Bronco, 95 million people watched the chase in slow motion on television, in real time. A year later, 150 million people – more than the largest Super Bowl audience – watched live as a jury returned a not guilty verdict.
We will never see anything like this again.
What you know intuitively because you’re reading this on the Internet: technology that allows people around the world to consume news and information about everything. Which means people around the world consume news and information about… All. Instead of just one thing.
But in the early 1990s, the Internet was still a curiosity, accessible by a small subset of tech-savvy people via dial-up modems. In 1994, AOL, the service that popularized the “World Wide Web,” had just over a million subscribers.
And television was truly a mass medium. Not only because he touched so many people, but because he showed so many of them the same thing. All three major broadcast networks – Rupert Murdoch’s Fox was still an upstart at the time – broke into their programming to broadcast Simpson’s pursuit live. And the following year, the Simpson case became a compelling national story, turning people like Kato Kalein and Lance Ito into micro-celebrities.
Photo by Rick Maiman/Sygma via Getty Images
The subsequent decline of television is well documented. (Today, when my editor told me, via Slack, that Simpson had died, it never even occurred to me to see how television covered him – even though there are giant screens with 24/7 cable news channels all around our newsroom.)
And the idea that we’ll never have a televised event like the Simpson case isn’t new either. Here’s a 2016 headline from Vanity Fair: “5 Reasons Why We’ll Never See Something Like the OJ Simpson Verdict Again.” »
Today, even this eight-year-old piece, by the excellent Joanna Robinson, seems sepia. Instead of watching the verdict on television, Robinson argued, reasonably, we “would be hunched over personal devices checking Twitter or Facebook or watching some sort of streaming video for the latest update.”
But this hypothesis was always based on the idea that we would all be paying attention to the same thing, but on different screens. This is simply not the case anymore.
Digital media can certainly attract the attention of many people to one thing, but it cannot compel everyone look A thing. There will always be something else interesting at hand.
Or more precisely, something interesting to you, but not to the person sitting next to you. This is why names like Addison Rae or KSI can be extremely important to tens of millions of people and completely unknown to the rest of the world.
By the way, one thing that’s not going away? True crime stories like Simpson’s. The Americans have devoured them forever.
They are still big today. But when people consume them now, they’re either accessing them through media like TikTok, which by design is meant to take you from one story to another; or through in-depth but niche forms like podcasts and streaming documents.
For example: Serial, the hit podcast, had 3.4 million downloads per episode. HBO’s “The Jinx” reached less than a million people per broadcast.
ALL RIGHT. Enough story for me. I will now broadcast June 17, 1994 – the ESPN documentary on the Simpsons chase. It’s supposed to be awesome. I’ve never seen it before – there are too many other things to watch.
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