How the OJ Simpson Trial Informed the Trump Trials

In the thirteen years I attended public school, I can remember exactly three times where they stopped class and let us watch breaking news because it was deemed "important enough" for us to miss school.  One of them, as you can imagine since I am a Millennial, was 9/11.  The second was the Columbia Space Disaster.  And the third was the OJ Simpson verdict.  As you can imagine, one of these with the distance of time seems a little less important to the public education of a child than the other two, but that was what happened in the OJ Simpson trial: it consumed America.  The thing I can remember (I was young enough to have vivid memories of it, not old enough to entirely understand all of the dynamics at play) was the amount of press that it received.  Every week for a year the cover of the tabloids were either something with OJ or something with Charles & Diana...they were the only two stories anyone in America was discussing circa 1994-95.  It wasn't just OJ Simpson that people knew.  By the end of that trial, you might not have been able to list all of your cousins by name, but you sure could pick Kato Kaelin or Lance Ito out in a lineup.  The trial was, in many ways, an encapsulation of the new 24-hour news media cycle.  While this had felt particularly essential during the Gulf War, with no news to fill it up, networks like CNN now had to rely on gossipy pseudo-news such as the OJ Simpson trial.  What would follow would be Monica Lewinsky, JonBenet Ramsey, Casey Anthony, & the Kardashians...celebrity garbage or sensationalistic trials that no one should be paying attention to with actual news in the world, but it's the thing that got the views (or, eventually, the clicks).

This begs the question on the week that Donald Trump goes to trial, the first former president in American history to have an actual criminal trial where he might be convicted of a felony...how will the press handle this?  The first trial (of the four currently lined up where Trump faces a total of 91 felony indictments) is the one that most legal pundits think is the least likely to result in a guilty verdict or prison time for Trump (though it's worth noting that even here, the chances that Trump gets convicted are high given the evidence presented so far).  

But it's also the most tabloid-friendly of all of the trials.  Trump is on-trial for allegedly bribing adult film actress Stormy Daniels to not talk about their affair, and illegally covering it up by claiming it was a legal expense.  He did this during his 2016 campaign for the White House against Hillary Clinton; had these payments become public, it's possible that it would've cost him the presidency.  One of the chief witnesses will be his former attorney Michael Cohen, who is himself a former convicted felon for his association with Trump.  Other likely witnesses include former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who also received payments (though not directly from Trump) to cover-up an affair with the former president, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and Hope Hicks, who allegedly worked as a surrogate between Cohen and the Trump campaign after the release of the Access Hollywood videos (where Trump made vulgar comments about women, specifically actress Arianne Zucker).

All of this adds up to about as perfect of a headwind as you can get for a clickbait trial.  You have a former president, one who has been a celebrity for decades & is good at attracting press, at the center of it.  You have at least three glamorous, tabloid-friendly women (Daniels, McDougal, & Hicks) who will likely take the stand.  And you have a colorful former employee of Trump's (Cohen) who has had intimate knowledge of the Trump trial for years.  This screams cable television in a way few other trials do.

The question is-will that be what happens?  I'm not going to pretend that the news has gotten more scrupulous in the years since the OJ Simpson, because it hasn't-it has gotten decidedly worse.  But it has become more partisan, and in most cases more politically conservative, in the years that followed.  It's doubtful, for example, that Fox News or Newsmax is going to be able to capitalize on the likely juicy details of Daniels' testimony in the way they would've if this was a Democratic politician.  CNN and The New York Times, as well, once paragons of impartiality, have been extremely Trump-friendly in their coverage in the past year.  It will be a question of ratings, I suspect, when it comes to them-do they turn off some of their gushing coverage of him (or, more frequently, the both-sides attacks equating him with Joe Biden when those equations don't add up) in order to capitalize on a trial that (on paper) captures the public's interest, or will they continue to feel pressure to have an in with a man who might still become president in November?

The OJ Simpson trial did not change journalism for the better-it made it far, far worse.  But I am curious as we encounter yet another Trial of the Century how the media will handle it-is it more about money or is it more about power when it comes to covering the trial of the once (and future?) president.