TV Reporting: Too much Paris, not enough news
by Leonard Pitts Jr.
The Miami Herald
June 20, 2007
One night 10 years ago, I found myself in a crazy place.
It was only the parking lot of a courthouse in Santa Monica, but craziness had come to that place on the wings of a jury verdict in the civil trial against O.J. Simpson. The Miami Herald had dispatched me there to gather color — i.e., anecdotes and imagery that gave a sense of what being there was like.
I found more color than a paint factory. A sky full of news helicopters. A guy with a guitar crooning Johnny B. Goode. An old lady chanting, ”O.J. is innocent!” People screaming right in each other’s faces for the benefit of TV cameras. A young woman fretting that she hoped she’d get a chance to scream, “murderer!”
”It’s weird,” Sidney Lee, an L.A. screenwriter, told me as we watched the crowd, ”because it’s not something that’s going to affect them. They’re not going to go to jail, they’re not going to get out of jail, they’re not going to have to pay.” These people, he said, would wake up the next morning and realize, “I guess it didn’t involve me, did it?”
But 10 years later, there has been no such realization. Ten years later, the Simpson trials seem less an aberration than a seminal moment in the de-evolution of TV news into something that might better be called “The News Show.”
And 10 years later, Stepha Henry is missing, and David Ovalle is livid. Continue reading “The Culture of Celebrity”
