The Simpson Case and the Decline of TV News

That night, when the announcement of a verdict in the civil trial of O.J. Simpson went head-to-head with President Clinton's State of the Union address, viewers got to see the clash of news values in the newsrooms of the TV networks.

With news of the verdict coming in at the same time as Clinton's speech, the networks were in a major quandary. Which story should they cover? The one they have to, or the one they want to?

Torn between traditional news values, which mandated covering the President's speech, and the new news values, which are built around entertainment above all else, ABC anchor Peter Jennings twice said, "Our bosses have decided we will carry the president's speech," as if he was saying, "Don't blame me."

Once upon a time, there would never be a debate over something like this. Whatever the President said or did was news. But the boobs who have been watching O.J. since the Bronco chase on the Los Angeles freeways wanted the verdict, and the anchormen had to give them what they wanted.

If you as a TV consumer haven't yet figured out that glitz rules, the night of February 4 was a great illustration of that reality. We saw the President of the United States upstaged by O.J. Simpson. We saw one of the most important dates on the political calendar shoved aside for a case that's been a national obsession for close to three years.

Worse, it was rumored that the White House tried to delay the verdict, so its values were no less hypocritical. It was a beautiful illustration of payback, since the speech had already been postponed a day to avoid competition with a beauty contest.

Only because it took the Brown family an hour to arrive at the courthouse, we got to see the usual pomp associated with the State of the Union address. The millionaire members of Congress marched in, most of them a testament to the buying power of special interests. And why had they sold their souls and our government to polluters, tobacco companies, arms manufacturers, natural resource profiteers and the communications industry itself? For the money to buy expensive television ads to get themselves reelected, that's why. Television is a big part of the problem, yet it's also part of the solution.

In the early days of broadcasting, it was generally acknowledged that the airwaves belonged to the American people. The obligation of broadcasters, in the words of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1934, was to serve the "public interest, convenience and necessity."

In exchange for the right to hold a broadcast license and earn whatever profits that came from being the license holder, the broadcasters had to operate in the public interest. Until the 1980s, those four words -- public interest, convenience and necessity -- were the bedrock principle that broadcasters operated under.

Under President Reagan, the FCC dropped all that under pressure from the broadcasters. The new cry was: Let the marketplace decide. The government would now longer require stations to fulfill limits for news, educational and public service programming. They could do whatever they wanted.

Television news once was a public trust. It used its awesome powers to create a national community for vital events like the Kennedy assassinations, the moon walk, the Watergate hearings and the Challenger explosion.

Now, television news is a profit center. We get the latest sensational murder, celebrity gossip, a pseudo-investigation into a health hazard or two, and assorted other blather. We don't get hard news, documentaries and real news analysis, because we're told nobody wants to watch them.

Nothing has blurred the line between news and entertainment more than the Simpson case. It has been a story that has forced us to confront the issues of race and class, domestic violence, police arrogance, and the nature of celebrity in America.

We could use more of this self-examination and television could have served as a national town meeting to discuss the issues. Instead, we saw yet another episode in how television can reduce anything into a commodity to be sold. And we wonder why journalism is held in such low esteem by Americans.