O.J. Simpson's case changed news coverage forever

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- Most of us can count on one hand the number of national news events that were so huge, we will always remember with crystal clarity where we were when they happened.

Twenty years ago Tuesday, I took part in ABC7's coverage of what would become one of the most watched live events in television history. Like you, I couldn't believe what was happening. What we were all witnessing together was a turning point in celebrity culture, the criminal justice system, and the news media.

Kimberle Crenshaw, a UCLA law professor, remembers where she was when Simpson led Los Angeles police on a slow-speed chase in a white Ford Bronco in 1994.

"I was in Ibiza, Spain," she said, "I was the only English-speaker in a bar, and everybody suddenly stopped to watch this white car driving down the freeway and I recognized the 405, that's my hometown."

Crenshaw said she found herself explaining to people in a bar in Spain, about a double murder in L.A., and the celebrity suspect O.J.

"In that moment, it captured the fact that this was going to be a story that the whole world was going to watch," Crenshaw said.

It was the most watched event on TV that year, more than the Super Bowl. It seemed all of America tuned in to watch the slow-speed pursuit of the white Ford Bronco up the 405, from south Orange County to Brentwood.

In the back of the Ford Bronco was O.J., holding a gun to his head. At the wheel? O.J.'s friend, Al Cowlings.

O.J. was suspected of the stabbing murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown, and Ronald Goldman. He had previously agreed to turn himself in, but the football star-turned celebrity pitchman and actor, was on the run from the police, and O.J.'s last run was on live TV.

"So, a combination of a real person, a real murder, you know, watching it play out on television in a way we had never seen anything like that play out, with the highest ratings by the way, almost ever at that time, 95 million people watched that chase," Tanya Hart of Urban Radio Networks said.

"It was the first time you had somebody who was that level of a celebrity, charged with this significant of a crime," Laurie Levenson, a professor of law at Loyola Law School.

As the chase wound its way up the 405 Freeway, and word spread, people gathered along the route cheering on the star whose nickname from his playing days was "The Juice."

His supporters came from all backgrounds, all races. In the months that followed, that began to change. A Washington Post poll found 71 percent of African Americans felt O.J. was not guilty, and 72 percent of white Americans felt O.J. was guilty - a huge racial divide, but why?

"This case followed on the heels of the Rodney King case, and many people in the community, communities of color, hated the LAPD," Levenson said.

Rodney King was beaten by L.A. police officers after a high-speed chase in 1991. The beating was caught on videotape. The officers who beat him were acquitted a year later, and a week of rioting followed.

"The other part of it, honestly, is I think a lot of people, African Americans as well, really didn't feel that he was innocent, but they felt that it was justified for hundreds of years of injustice to black people," Hart said.

But did Simpson's fame and wealth insulate him from the harsh treatment Rodney King endured? After an hours-long standoff, O.J. gave up, and police allowed him to call his mother and have a glass of orange juice.

"Just a year or two earlier, you know, an African American man ran from the police, and he almost didn't live to talk about it anymore. So, you know, you got the sense from the very beginning that this was going to be a trial in which the defendant was going to be treated differently," Crenshaw said.

And covered differently... There were 12 helicopters overhead. Every local station, and every broadcast network covered the pursuit and the standoff. The Ford Bronco chase was a news event that became a reality TV show, and things haven't been the same since.

"There have been cases that have been high visibility, but they're not the O.J. case, they're not the whole nation watching this Bronco go down a freeway," Levenson said. "The news media learned that it can get big ratings by covering a car chase or covering a trial, or by covering high publicity lawyers. So it's not that the media went away, they just took it on as an ongoing matter."

Hart agrees.

"I don't know what happened in the past 20 years, but I'll tell you one thing, that slow chase that took place 20 years ago today changed American culture forever," she said.