MovieChat Forums > Is O.J. Innocent? The Missing Evidence (2017) Discussion > The trial was a huge turning point for t...

The trial was a huge turning point for the country...

posted 7 years ago by DialingForDollarhyde
5 replies | jump to latest

and not in a good way, of course. I'd estimate that 96% of the people involved found a way to profit from it, from books to Playboy spreads to whoring themselves out on talk shows. Jay Leno milked it every night on his already horrid version of The Tonight Show.

My diatribe extends to the advent of reality tv circa 1999/2000, which inexplicably proliferated to a disgusting degree after 9/11 and still plagues the world. It helped begat Trump for president for ****'s sake.

I was 30 years old when the trial was on and I had never seen such media whoredom before. It definitely paved the way.

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[–] slidell333 7 years ago

IMHO it def. opened the floodgates to basically what I would call "classless" and "tasteless" exploitation and promotion of anyone and anything. Do the Kardashians become as popular without OJ?

It was becoming a phenomena before, starting with the Menendez brothers, etc...and highlighted in Natural Born Killers in '94 but the OJ trial sent it into new territory.

[–] tango09212 7 years ago

actually it was the rodney king trial the year b/4 where an all white jury acquitted 4 white officers even though the the beating was on video tape , where the white community said nothing about that verdict yet when a jury that was mixed which had at least one white juror on the panel reached an acquittal , white america reacted and this show clearly illustrate how much hatred white america had in that verdict ,

[–] slidell333 7 years ago

Funny you mentioned that as I was going to mention Rodney King...I remember being in High School and my science teacher just let us watch the LA riots everyday instead of work...

It was as if the OJ trial and story fed our growing appetite for 24-hour scandal (not news). I'm not sure which was first but CourtTV popped up around that time.

I also remember watching the NBA Finals and NBC choosing to show the Bronco chase. I remember exactly where I was like yesterday.

I knew the OJ verdict was payback for those acquittals, and all I can say is "what goes around comes around." The OJ verdict was silly but the LAPD officer's cases were just as egregious. Two wrongs don't make a right but I understood it. There's only so much BS you can take. The main irony is OJ was not exactly a member of the black community and could've cared less about anything but himself.

[–] SteverB 7 years ago

That continues to this day. I live near Chicago and have been hearing more and more about white cops getting charged with murder when they shoot unarmed black men, not just in Chicago. It's to the point that the charges are anticlimactic. Hopefully, someday there will be an actual conviction. Most of these murders are on video and still with the acquittals. It's ridiculous. Juries seem afraid to convict a racist cop for murder.

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[–] abodiker 7 years ago

Seems like it was the lead-in to reality TV - and as someone else mentioned - the Kardashians