Media Matters [antikvár]

Prologue: "The Juice Is Loose" On a sultry June night in 1994 the consciousness of the United States was, once again, absorbed by the media. As with the Gulf War, the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, and the Rodney King beating, the electronic image was the reality that America experienced. In this case, the media event that was relayed live into the homes, motels, and bars of America from seven news helicopters was the police chase and arrest of O.J. (the Juice) Simpson, a football hero, sportscaster, and media celebrity, accused of the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Goldman, a friend of Nicole. This was no conventional television car chase—no tires squealed, no cars scattered piles of boxes on the sidewalk, and not a fender was dented. It was a chase that kept within the speed limits and obeyed all the rules of the road. The man driving O.J., his lifelong friend Al CowUngs, was eventually charged with harboring a fugitive, but not with reckless driving. Indeed, the event became more like a parade, even a victory parade, than the chase and arrest of a suspected murderer. Twelve police cruisers followed O.J.'s white Ford Bronco at a safe distance, making no attempt to intercept, as Cowlings drove carefully along the Southern California freeways while O.J. used his cellular phone to talk to his mother and the poUce used it to talk to him. Other motorists, listening to news about the event on their radios, pulled over to allow the cavalcade to pass, and, as it did, many waved encouragement and support to O.J. Still others who had been watching at home on television drove to the freeway with hastily lettered banners proclaiming their support for their hero. They packed the freeway overpasses, shouting, "We love you, O.J." and, recalling an ironically appropriate chant from his days as a record-setting running back, "The Juice is loose." Interviewed on television afterward, some who had lined the freeway to watch the procession explained that this was their first chance, or, for others, their last, to see their media hero in the flesh, or, we might think, to add a material dimension to their experience of his electronic reality. The procession eventually came to halt in O.J.'s driveway, where the star sat for an hour in the Bronco, still apparently threatening suicide, until the negotiations produced a safe, tame, and anticUmactic final curtain. xiii