THE O.J. SIMPSON MURDER TRIAL : Feast of the Insatiable Media

At last, something to overshadow that other obese spectacle, the Super Bowl. Inscribe it in stone: O.J. Simpson VII.

Or does it just seem like seven years, instead of merely a bit more than seven months, since the start of the overblown odyssey that has consumed so many of the media, and much of the nation, since the discovery of the bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman outside her Brentwood townhouse?

How overblown?

* So overblown that Tuesday’s long-awaited opening statements in O.J. Simpson’s murder trial seemed almost anticlimactic coming after months of wild speculating, fantasizing and rumormongering. The exception came late in the day when Judge Lance A. Ito angrily aborted Tuesday’s session--prior to defense attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. delivering his opening statement to the jury--reportedly after learning that at least one alternate juror had been caught by the Court TV pool camera as it roamed the courtroom.

At least temporarily, the lapsed-telecasting issue threatened to eclipse the trial itself, and it remained to be seen whether Ito would now permanently boot TV from the courtroom, something the defense apparently would oppose.

Cochran’s co-counsel Robert L. Shapiro gave the dispute a cosmic spin: “The world has a right to hear our opening statement.”

Earlier, a sweeter, gentler, softer, frillier Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark had presented the “how” of the homicides, following Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher A. Darden’s depiction of Simpson as an uncontrollably jealous man who slew his gentle Desdemona and her friend, Goldman.

As for the prosecution’s side, at least, hadn’t we heard the thrust of all of this previously? Thus, was it worthy of the mass simulcasting--all these screens showing identical pictures--by ABC, NBC, CBS, three cable channels and six local stations?

* So overblown that the Simpson-Goldman case has become a common denominator, a shared national language by which many Americans now communicate, the case having been indelibly branded into their psyches. Simpsonspeak has penetrated even the world of hoops where, in the course of his radio/TV play-by-play announcing of Monday night’s Los Angeles Lakers-Charlotte Hornets game, good old Chick Hearn weighed in, saying about a disputed referee’s call: “Judge Ito wouldn’t have changed that call. Boy, is he some smooth man?” Will Simpsonspeak also seep into Sunday’s Super Bowl telecast that Ito has given jurors permission to watch?

* So overblown that early Monday morning the usually circumspect Aaron Brown, one of four ABC News correspondents now assigned to cover the case full time, promised on radio that the Simpson trial would be “the biggest trial ever.” That’s an upgrade from trial of the century.

As Ito likes to advise hyperventilating lawyers: It’s time to take a deep breath. Is the Simpson trial bigger, in terms of lasting impact, than the Nuremberg tribunal that sent Nazi war criminals to the gallows? Bigger than the Adolf Eichmann trial? The Scopes Monkey Trial or those trials that have led to landmark Supreme Court decisions that have dramatically altered U.S. society? Bigger than the trials of those four Los Angeles police officers accused of criminally beating Rodney G. King, the first of whose verdicts sparked rioting in some sections of Los Angeles? Of course, anointing it as the “biggest trial ever” was one way to justify months of the biggest coverage ever--as part of that steady media drum roll leading to Tuesday’s opening statements. No wonder that probably many more Americans knew in advance about those opening statements than about that evening’s live TV coverage of State of the Union speech by President Clinton.

Say what you want about the Super Bowl, but at least its kickoff begins on schedule, whereas an array of tedious legal skirmishes caused the long-awaited opening statements to the jury to be rescheduled to Monday from last week, then rescheduled again to Tuesday.

Not so tedious, however, as to alter preset plans by much of television to preempt regular programs to carry the opening of O.J. Simpson VII live on Monday. These electronic media folks were anticipating the start of opening statements but instead found themselves rouged, massacred and gowned to the hilt with no place to go. Rather than withdraw, however, everyone went with full-blown live coverage anyway.

It’s just a hoot that television, which zooms to breaking news with astonishing speed, often becomes trapped in the quicksand of its own technology in seeking to remove itself from a story when there is no story. At least not one that merits this level of mobilization, or the attention to minutiae reflected in ABC News correspondent Cynthia McFadden’s comment to anchor Peter Jennings during Tuesday’s lunch break: “Jurors No. 620, 1427 and 2457 were each taking notes at various points.”

By that time, prosecutor Darden already had described Simpson to the jury as a man whose private face differed dramatically from his public face. TV’s inquiring minds wanted to know which face was on exhibit during the prosecution’s opening statements.

At one point Tuesday, Shapiro looked directly at the camera as it shot Simpson in close-up, then whispered something to his client, who nodded and then resumed taking notes on a legal pad. Was it rehearsed behavior? And was that a thin smile on Simpson’s face at another point or merely a neutral expression? TV’s in-house facial experts warmed to this long-range speculation with a fury, and KCBS-TV Channel 2, for one, promised to “analyze his expression for clues” to what Simpson was thinking. Twitch by twitch, presumably.

You’d expect nothing less from coverage of the biggest trial ever. We have a right to hear it. The world has a right to hear it.