THE O.J. SIMPSON MURDER TRIAL : Playing and Replaying the Score Card

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the media.

I realize that television treats nearly everything as entertainment and that, as products of TV yourselves, you must be swiftly engaged, poor babies, else you’ll tune out. So please excuse me if I’m not impassioned enough for you or if, while reading this, you nod off before I become “riveting,” to use one of your favorite words.

But I simply must express my outrage at your obsession with minutiae and push-button disembowelments of closing arguments in the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial, almost paragraph by paragraph as if you were football play-by-play commentators rather than observers of courtroom speeches and behavior. I half expected John Madden to show up with his telestrator.

“What are the prime areas where you think Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. is scoring and where do you think he will be most vulnerable on rebuttal,” criminal defense attorney Leonard Levine was asked on KCAL-TV, Channel 9, on Wednesday before Simpson’s lead attorney had wrapped up.

And here was KTTV-TV, Channel 11 anchor John Beard speaking about Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher A. Darden during the trial’s midmorning break on Wednesday: “He doesn’t seem quite as fluid as he was last night.” Perhaps it was the heavy pass rush. Perhaps Darden should have rolled right and hit a receiver downfield.

Whether on TV or in print, meanwhile, this hasty and facile courtroom score-carding of Mr. Johnnie and Ms. Marcia is at times entertaining, but infrequently fruitful.

Tuesday and Wednesday, the opening days of closing arguments, brought TV’s usual chorus of yadda yadda yaddas, the lawyers, commentators, newspeople, academics and other human sound bites who have been spreading on the airwaves like measles while feasting on the Simpson case as Eskimos do on a whale. On Wednesday’s “Today” program, even dismissed Simpson juror Francine Florio-Bunten turned up as an “NBC News Consultant.” Who next, court reporters?

You wonder about the private agendas of these trial talkers, just how many are using the occasion to audition for their own shows. Or advertise the ones they’ve already earned via their O.J. service. Just the other day, usually serene CNN attorney regulars Roger Cossack and Greta Van Susteren got into a shrewish spat over a Simpson issue, after which Cossack boasted that this would probably be the tenor of the CNN legal series they’ll be co-hosting one of these millennia after the Simpson trial has finally concluded. Move over, “Crossfire.”

Speaking of loud noise and little light, Days 1 and 2 of the closing arguments went something like this, if you bought what you heard on TV: Lead prosecutor Clark’s decision to open defensively by clobbering former Detective Mark Fuhrman, the discredited prosecution witness, was inexplicable. It was a terrible blunder, it was absolutely the right thing to do, it was brilliant. Clark’s presentation was so tedious that it bored the jury, which was transfixed by her mesmerizing presentation, which tended to ramble while being delivered with precision. The media verdict came in on something else too. It seems that Clark’s lack of passion in front of the jury was a shrewd strategy that sank her. And Darden was fumbling, he was spellbinding. He was brief, he went on too long.

KCBS-TV, Channel 2 reporter Harvey Levin had seen enough (the first 80 minutes of Cochran’s closing argument) to proclaim Cochran’s presentation “extremely effective . . . on several levels,” so much so that he “could undercut [Clark’s] case dramatically.” So omnipotent was Cochran, in fact, that on KABC-TV, Channel 7 Southwestern Law School professor Karen Smith was finding “his organization at this point . . . somewhat random.”

Cochran “had the attention of everyone on the jury,” Tracie Savage of Channel 4 reported from the courthouse. “More or less so than Chris Darden or Marcia Clark previously?” asked Chuck Henry from the studio. Savage paused briefly to contemplate the bottomless, slippery abyss of Henry’s penetrating question before responding--reluctantly, it appeared--that Cochran had the jury’s attention as much as Clark did.

Well, there you had it. As of 3:15 p.m. Wednesday. Cochran matched Clark, but Darden was champ despite his missing fluidity. This was true despite someone telling Channel 7 reporter John Long during the morning break about a juror who had “shifted a little uncomfortably in her seat” during Darden’s delivery. Earlier, several reporters had mentioned a different juror dozing in front of Darden. Could this mean that the prosecution case was cooked?

On TV, reading the minds and body language of jurors increasingly passes for reporting. During Tuesday’s “Nightline,” His Weightiness Ted Koppel asked Leslie Abramson, now getting more famous as a trial observer for ABC News than for defending Erik Menendez, to rate Clark’s effectiveness that day. In a surprise, the usually willing Abramson responded that she had no way of knowing what the jury was thinking. Get outa here!

“You have to wait until it’s all over before you make a total assessment,” that renegade Al Deblanc, legal analyst for KTLA-TV, Channel 5, said on the air Wednesday. Get outa here!

More typical was Wednesday’s “Good Morning America” on ABC, where dismissed Simpson juror Michael Knox was tossed a spate of “if” questions by co-host Charles Gibson. “If you had been sitting in the box yesterday, would you have been able to stay attentive the whole time?” he asked Knox, for example. Yet Knox wasn’t in “the box,” nor, he acknowledged, had he watched all of Clark’s presentation. So how would he know?

Not to worry. He knew, he knew. “Yes,” Knox replied.

On TV, everyone knows something, even when there may be nothing to know. That was reaffirmed Wednesday night when Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levinson reported on Channel 2 that only three jurors had paid attention to the rousing rhetoric ending Day 1 of Cochran’s presentation. Minutes earlier, writer Dominick Dunne had said the entire jury was “riveted.”

The message is clear, ladies and gentlemen of the media: These instant responses are so subjective, what’s the point of airing them?