Is the Public Still Hungry for Simpson News?

Much of the American media’s relationship with their audience is played out in an intellectual hall of mirrors, where substance is difficult to distinguish from reflection and causality is at best an elusive quality.

For example, the current round of shadowboxing among print and electronic news executives over how to handle coverage of O.J. Simpson turns on an uncertainty over whether anybody out there is still listening.

Like nearly everything else about the Simpson case, the answer is in dispute, but the line between the contending sides is clear. On one side is much of the mainstream news media, which seems to have breathed a collective sigh of relief and decided that its audience’s interest in the former football star has waned. On the other side are the print and electronic tabloids, which say their readers and viewers remain fascinated with the case.

Both have evidence they say supports their conclusion.

“I think the public interest has diminished,” said CBS News Vice President Lane Venardos. “People are tired of hearing the same things over and over.” Like others, he notes that the audience for Black Entertainment Television’s interview with Simpson last week was 3 million homes. That is 10 times the number of households BET normally reaches in that time period, but it is fewer than the major broadcast networks reach with even their lowest-rated prime-time programs. Even by cable standards, it represented only 7% of BET’s potential audience and about half of what ESPN gets with its National Football League games.

“I think these numbers show the interest in O.J. has waned,” said David Poltrack, the CBS vice president in charge of audience research. But, like Venardos, he said that “if there suddenly were some major revelation in the story, I think you’d see the public interested again.”

Several Los Angeles news directors also believe that the public had slowly but surely tired of the continuing Simpson saga, which reached its apogee with his acquittal on double murder charges in October and continues with the wrongful death lawsuits filed against him by the victims’ families and estates.

“I would say that the interest in O.J. Simpson stories has considerably flagged since the verdict,” said Bill Lord, news director of NBC-TV Channel 4 in Los Angeles.

Larry Perret, news director of KCBS-TV Channel 2, said “there is definitely a backlash. There are people who are just sick of it.”

*

Although ratings are a fact of life in television, mainstream newspapers such as The Times generally do not attempt to measure audience response over the short term. Moreover, newspaper circulation does not tend to fluctuate markedly in response to the coverage of particular stories.

Arrayed against the notion that the popular preoccupation with Simpson has diminished are the tabloids, which live or die by their weekly sales and ratings. The editors of two of the leading supermarket tabloids--the Globe and National Enquirer--say their circulation goes up as much as 25%--250,000 readers for the Globe and 500,000 for the Enquirer--when they feature the Simpson case. Both will have Simpson on their cover when their next issues go on sale Monday.

“Our figures show that when we don’t go big on O.J. Simpson, our circulation slumps,” said the Globe’s editor, Tony Frost. “With a good O.J. story, you’re talking about a 250,000-300,000 sales increase” for the paper, which normally sells 1 million copies a week.

Frost expects that level of interest to persist through the civil trial and beyond. The reason, he says, is that the story amounts to “a real life soap opera. Marcia Clark, Johnnie Cochran, Denise Brown, Chris Darden, Fred Goldman--they’re all viewed by members of the tabloid audience as the equivalent of characters from ‘Dallas’ and ‘Dynasty.’ ”

Steve Coz, executive editor of the National Enquirer, said that “from our perspective, the public is more interested in O.J. at this point in time than in the preceding two months. There has been a renewed public interest, due to the civil trial. If it was a 10 at the height of the criminal trial, right now it’s about a 7.

“Most Americans think he’s guilty. Now the question is: Will justice prevail? The people who think he’s guilty hope the civil trial will provide justice, and that’s renewing the interest. We’re approaching it from that angle,” Coz said.

Their electronic counterparts say their situation is the same. “This story has incredible legs,” said Charles Lachman, co-executive producer of the syndicated “American Journal” and “Inside Edition” TV programs. “The public is still fascinated by this. We will have at least one O.J. story a day on ‘American Journal.’ [Former NBC legal correspondent] Star Jones will be doing legal analysis of the civil trial. We are making a major commitment of O.J.”

So are the other TV tabloids, all of which have major Simpson pieces planned for their crucial February sweeps week.

And at least some viewers of the mainstream electronic media appear to share the tabloid viewers’ enthusiasm. Bob Sieber, vice president in charge of audience research for CNN and other Turner Broadcasting System channels, said there still is interest in the story, even if it isn’t as high as it was during the trial.

At The Times’ request, Sieber analyzed the ratings of four CNN talk shows this month--”Larry King Live,” “Talk Back Live,” “Burden of Proof” and “CNN and Co.” He found that the nine installments that were about Simpson had ratings 30% higher than the programs that were not.

Moreover, executives at BET insist that other television news executives are underestimating the impact of last week’s Simpson interview because they fail to take into account the nature of the cable operation’s regular audience.

“Ninety percent of our ratings come from black households, and obviously this reached way beyond that,” said Cheryl Holmes, BET’s head of advertising and research. “There were a lot of people turning us on that have never turned us on before. This is a phenomenal number for a cable network. It’s like the Super Bowl for us.”

But to some analysts, this divergence of opinion between the tabloids and much of the mainstream media over how to handle the Simpson case suggests a healthy reassertion of the news values and taste that ought to divide the serious media from the more sensational press. Others detect something less lofty at work: The absence of a live television feed from the civil proceedings against Simpson, they say, has relieved mainstream news executives from the pressure to cover a popular story they find personally distasteful.

“All through our coverage of the Simpson trial,” said one leading network news executive, who asked not to be identified, “we wrestled on a daily basis with the question of whether we were doing the right thing? Was our coverage being driven by a tabloid sensibility?

“We never answered that question to anyone’s satisfaction,” the executive added, “and I think everyone’s glad to have the pressure off and to get back to business as usual. Moreover, the truth is that our attention span is finite and Simpson has exhausted it.

“And without television inside the deposition on a daily basis, there’s no magnetic pull to keep us focused on this event as opposed to all the others vying for our attention.”

*

Others suspect that the public’s preoccupation with Simpson has declined because, while Americans remain fascinated by celebrity, they’re quickly bored by notoriety.

“I think the falloff is connected with the fact that people are beginning to understand that they’re not going to hear any bombshells,” said attorney Jill Lansing, who defended Lyle Menendez in his first trial and has been a frequent commentator on the Simpson case. “People have watched him being interviewed because they hope we will understand more--either because he will incriminate himself or will demonstrate that he clearly is not the person who did it. That hope has declined. People find that no matter how much they watch, listen and read, they don’t know any more than they did beforehand.

“The result is that O.J. Simpson has become a modern Lizzie Borden--he’s been acquitted, but will forever be believed guilty by a substantial number of people.”

Lansing’s colleague, defense attorney Gigi Gordon--also a frequent commentator during Simpson’s double murder trial--disagreed.

“I think it’s sort of chic to insist you’re not interested in what O.J. Simpson has to say,” she said, “but I don’t really believe it. I think people are as interested as ever, but the mainstream media’s decision to cut back its coverage simply has denied them the ability to satisfy their curiosity. . . .

“The major media has been intimidated out of covering this story,” Gordon said, “by the white community’s consensus that further attention would perpetuate the miscarriage of justice whites believe occurred in the criminal trial. In other words, what we’ve got here is a kind of quiet boycott, as opposed to a genuine lack of interest.”

But another legal expert, defense lawyer Barry Tarlow, said the diminution of coverage, particularly through the elimination of live television, is entirely good.

“I have no doubt that the spectacle of televised courtroom proceedings fans the public’s prurient interest in those proceedings,” he said.

In fact, Tarlow’s wish is shared by the editors of the two supermarket tabloids. The absence of live television coverage of Simpson’s civil trial, said the Globe’s Frost, “can only help the tabloids, in that our readers will expect to read things that the mainstream press aren’t getting.”

Coz, his principal rival, agreed. “People will still want information, so they’ll turn to the Enquirer for O.J. coverage.”

Rutten reported from Los Angeles, Hall from New York. Times staff writers Henry Weinstein and Greg Braxton also contributed to this story.