Victimized…again

Six years ago, I took aim at the broadcast media’s shameless coverage of O.J. Simpson. That included Fox. Flashback, July 28, 2000, “Stop milking the O.J.:”

On Tuesday, Simpson appeared on “Fox News Live” in the afternoon and on “The Edge With Paula Zahn” in prime time. The network’s website hyped the interviews, which coincided with Simpson’s hype campaign for his own Internet pay site endeavor (which we will refrain from advertising here). Teases and cross-promotions were endless. Fox News.com proudly directed visitors to an archive of Internet videos of past O.J. appearances. “Juice Explosion,” one clip was captioned. “Bitter Juice,” decried another.

In October, Fox News rushed to put a 911 call on the air in which Simpson reported having trouble with a girlfriend he claimed had a drug problem. In June, the network had a field day when Simpson called in to “The Fox Report with Shepard Smith” and insulted Denise Brown, his ex-wife’s sister. Over the past two months alone, a half-dozen different FOX shows have devoted hours of “news” coverage, including: “O.J. Simpson Goes on the Defensive, “Fallout Continues from O.J. Simpson-Denise Brown Confrontation,” “The O.J. Simpson Trial: Six Years Later,” “Can O.J. Simpson Prove His Innocence?,” “Personal Story: O.J. Simpson’s New Job,” and “O.J. Simpson Gets Angry.”

…While Simpson promotes his latest venture on yet another trashy publicity tour, the families have yet to collect a penny of the $33.5 million civil judgment against Simpson for the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman. They will be waiting a long time. Simpson, however, won’t remain in financial bankruptcy for long. He’s cashing in on the moral bankruptcy of media organizations that greedily embrace evil as infotainment.

Six years later, not a penny of that $33.5 million civil judgment has yet been paid. Simpson is coming out with a book, as the whole world knows. Fox is in the eye of the O.J. storm again (this time it’s Fox Broadcasting, not Fox News Channel).

And I haven’t changed my mind one bit.

Here’s vid of O’Reilly weighing in critically on the upcoming O.J. interviews; Geraldo’s criticizing it, too. John Gibson makes the distinction between Fox Broadcasting and FNC clear here.

And here is video of Alan Colmes using this horrid occasion to try and beat Mark Fuhrman over the head with the race card after Fuhrman simply described the casual, conscience-free nature of killers like O.J.

The circus continues.

I read Judith Regan’s emotion-addled explanation at the Drudge Report. In a nutshell: She made the decision to publish the evil killer’s book and a tape her two-part interview for Fox Broadcasting because she was a domestic violence victim who raised two children alone after her abusive, loser, ex-husband abandoned her.

Whaaaat?

Look, I’m very sorry for the personal pain and suffering Regan has endured and overcome. But why that justifies victimizing the Brown and Goldman families all over again, humiliating Nicole Simpson’s two surviving, troubled children further, and distracting this already distracted country from the nationwide and global threats we face today is beyond me. It makes no sense–though it will make plenty of cents.

You wanna make money and attract eyeballs by putting on a vulgar, sweeps-week O.J. freak show? Go ahead. But don’t dress it up as public interest journalism, or a historically significant probe “to gain insight into the mind of a sociopath,” or a noble search for truth that adds something worthwhile to public discourse. This new specatcle adds nothing. Nothing. We already know the truth. As La Shawn Barber put it bluntly, O.J. Simpson is hellbound. What more is there to “understand?” Haven’t there been enough endless interviews giving the sociopath a platform to bare his rotted soul and mind?

Slumming with O.J. is what I called it six years ago: The journalistic equivalent of dumpster diving. And that is all I will have to say about the O.J. orgy that will soil the airwaves through Thanksgiving.

Ugh.

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