Race rage and denial: the media and the O.J. trials.

There were remarkable contrasts between the media coverage of the verdicts in the criminal trial of O. J. Simpson and the civil proceedings. The contrast was not in the amount of attention paid to either event, as the most astonishing aspect of this whole affair remains how permanently affixed these mostly inconsequential trials became to our daily television rituals. Instead, the contrast was between the reactions to the two verdicts and, by implication, the contrasting descriptions of how whites and African Americans viewed these cases. The coverage was marked by dramatic and questionable generalizations about the views of each community toward the trials, law enforcement, the justice system, and each other. The O.J. trials exposed the double standards of a media system obsessed by celebrity and unable to tackle the difficult issues raised by such events.

The most important facet of the O.J. saga, and the so called national dialogue on race which ensued, is how it high lighted the abject failure of the mainstream media to provide an effective and meaningful forum for public discussion of even the most basic information about our society and the world. But the media didn't fail simply because they are populated by a variety of elites and professionals who appeared content to merely keep track of every minute detail of the proceedings while preening and posturing for their audiences. The choices made in the coverage--to concentrate on individual personalities and downplay the interconnections between concepts like race, justice, and official corruption--were based upon a disastrous set of priorities that have increasingly animated news and public affairs programming in the mainstream media over the last two decades.

RAGE AND CELEBRATION

When the jury in the criminal trial re turned its verdict, the mainstream media resonated with a multitude of anecdotal images completing a script that had been hinting darkly about America's "racial divide" since the end of the Bronco chase. Some of the images were truly stirring and most were emotionally charged: African Americans were seen to be enmeshed in a jubilant celebration, while rooms full of crestfallen whites were presented to demonstrate what our most available commentators reported as the shocking and inviolable gap in perception between these two worlds. In turn, there quickly appeared a palpable sense of panic in some spheres of American society while in others there appeared to exist a feeling of retribution. At least that is what the torrent of imagery was supposed to suggest. Reality has since proven itself to be far more complex.

The intensity of the celebrations in African American communities was supposed to be in direct proportion to the "hidden rage" that has existed in these communities for decades. The marker of race relations most often cited as a possible parallel to the O.J. trial was the violent reaction to the acquittal of the Los Angeles police officers who were videotaped beating Rodney King. Many commentators worried that a guilty verdict in Simpson's criminal trial would provoke a similar reaction. But as Patricia J. Williams notes in a March 1995) Nation, the fact that these fearful predictions jostled for media space with official reports admitting to tremendous police corruption in the Bronx and Harlem went unnoticed. As Williams argues, the fear of black civil unrest and violence "reduces black anxiety about the justice system to superficial and singular television encounters" and "dangerously misreads the discontent of a significant population that is not merely disaffected but enraged, whose fury is barely reflected in the staggering rates of black criminalization and imprison meet."

But few picked up on Williams' sentiments. Instead, reporters seized on polling data which indicated the now cliche differences in perception between blacks and whites. These polls were cited repeatedly and became frozen in time: blacks said not guilty; whites said guilty. But the actual data has changed over time. While a majority of blacks have consistently said there was not enough evidence to convict Simpson, a plurality have also said their perceptions of the justice system hadn't really changed because of the trial, and many have changed their minds about Simpson's guilt since 1994. Clearly, one can't read simple retribution into these figures. In fact, the only real certainty that can be read into the mountain of often confusing and contradictory poll results is a drastic skepticism on the part of most African Americans toward the Los Angeles Police Department and the California justice system during a criminal trial marked by significant police misconduct and very expensive lawyers. Many polls indicated that whites were just as suspicious of the character of the legal representation Simpson acquired, but they were simply less skeptical about official misconduct.

In contrast to the comparatively moderate polling numbers, the reactions by numerous angry media commentators to this clearly unusual trial were extreme and often fantastical. The most obvious expression of this was the flood of recommendations directed at "fixing" a justice system that was clearly broken. The editors of the New Republic argued that, in today's society, jury members are usually picked for their "ignorance and credulity," being careful to point out that "polls have consistently shown that belief in Simpson's guilt increases with education." Thus they pleaded, "Is it rational for us to systematically exclude educated people from such deliberations, because they are more likely to be informed about the case or have pre-determined views on a whole variety of subjects?" Furthermore, in the good old days, jury members were "selected by `key men' in their community for their intelligence, moral probity, and capacity for calm, reasoned debate." The Simpson jury, the editors argued, failed this test and therefore significant reform is our only option.

Many, like Michael Lind in the same magazine, argued that, as a result of the Simpson verdict, the antiquated jury system should simply be abolished. After all, he says, "Urban black juries all too often pUt race above justice" in the same way that bigoted whites re fused to accede to the demands of justice during the century long struggle for civil rights in the South, acquitting literally hundreds of their fellow citizens of some truly hideous crimes. Of course, these were "key men" selected for their "moral probity," unlike the uneducated rabble allowed to determine Simpson's fate. Yet despite innumerable incidences of jury nullification so common in the American South through out this century, the reform of this "unfair" and "excessively political" institution is only now being raised for debate.

The inherent equivalence between white lynch mobs and contemporary black jurists aside, the implications of this argument are that race has no place in the justice system and that the system should be "colorblind." But what does this euphemism mean? Color blind like the law enforcement efforts that land millions of black suspects in jail, or colorblind like the news media which salaciously report on youth crime as if it were the only activity of which young black men are capable, other than a small variety of sports heroics? Can we possibly drain a justice system of color in a society whose central institutions of enforcement and punishment are overflowing with racial animus?

Interestingly, while there were many calls for a cleanup of the nation's police departments in the wake of the criminal verdict, these never seemed to quite acquire the moral tenor or ap parent permanence of jury reform. In stead, many in the media simply wanted to excuse the "deficiencies" of those collecting and assessing the evidence of O.J.'s guilt or innocence, as if these activities had no real bearing on the trial of someone they clearly viewed as guilty. Jack E. White of Time magazine unambiguously expressed this position: "To whites, the central issue is whether Simpson is a murderer, while to blacks it is whether the process that brought him to trial was fatally contaminated by racial bias." He argued simply that "the cops may have tried to frame a guilty man." Newsweek's Jonathan Alter echoed this theme by suggesting that the white rage directed at the verdict was primarily the result of expectations that blacks would "look beyond race to facts, as many whites had during the Rodney King trial." When these expectations were thwarted, whites became "hardened." The inconvenient facts of official corruption and incompetence were apparently irrelevant.

THE DENIAL OF SOCIAL REALITY

It is no coincidence that the notion of colorblind justice predominated after the verdict in the civil trial was handed down, when all of a sudden the jury system seemed to work again. The editorial board of the Baltimore Sun, voicing the clear position of the majority of media institutions, suggested, "The two juries have spoken. It is time for closure in this case, time to look ahead" This idea of closure, now so prevalent, is simply the final indication that the near total denial by the mainstream media of the existence of widespread racism is simply not going to be honestly or openly examined. Euphemistic phrases like "mad at the system" are still being used to describe the anger in the black community and to obscure the real source of the racial divide in this country.

It is undeniable that those in the governing majority in this country, mostly all of whom are white, have been on a rampage lately, attacking affirmative action, ending social welfare programs, disallowing most black majority congressional districts, increasing the already harsh penalties for those on the wrong side of the war on drugs, but still providing no alternatives on any of these issues. There is no alternative to prison for those convicted of involvement in the drug trade, no alternative to the meager efforts on employment equity through affirmative action, no alternative to poverty other than working at a job that does not provide health care, child care, or even a living wage. Also, Republican leaders in state after state are fighting to the death any proposals for equitable school funding between their suburban districts and inner cities. To justify their agenda, the current reactionary conservative movement argues that it is the "absence of restraint," not resources, that causes poverty. Others simply assume that there is an exclusive and inherent connection between African Americans and social dysfunction; meanwhile the dire state of many minority communities is becoming more and more difficult to ignore.

Regardless of their presumed causes, the consequences of poverty and crime on minority communities have been particularly harsh. The Sentencing Project, an organization that studies alternatives to imprisonment, has re leased a number of frightening reports on the state of what is called "corrections" in this country. Among other findings, recent reports have noted the following:

* African Americans make up 51 percent of the prison population and about 12 percent of the total population.

* More than one-third of African American men in their twenties are under some kind of court supervision (prison, parole, probation).

* Ninety percent of all those jailed in state prisons for drug offenses are black or Hispanic.

* Blacks make up about 13 percent of the monthly drug using population, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

* Fourteen percent of African American men (about 1.46 million) are permanently barred from voting as the result of a felony conviction.

* In general, an African American man is seven times more likely to go to prison than a white man.

Yet it is important to note that none of these facts has ever been deliberately hidden from view. All have appeared in numerous mainstream publications over the past two years and yet somehow have caused no mainstream commentator to lobby for prison reform and have produced little legislation to provide alternatives to prison sentences.

OPENING A REAL DIALOGUE

It might be possible to assume that the comfortable people in this country simply don't care anymore. However, I'm going to assume that most do care, and I will further assume that, if we all had a decent understanding of the depth of the kinds of poverty and crime that exist in this country, we would be willing to act in a more judicious fashion and bring to bear the same outrage directed at the overblown Simpson affair and apply it to more socially relevant targets.

One such target is the media. It is important to understand that the O.J. trials became the unlikely repositories for an enormity of anxieties about the racial divide in our society because there exists no other forum of any serious social consequence in which to talk about them.

Over the last fifteen years, there has been a gradual and legally sanctioned withdrawal of the mainstream media from serious discussion of the most significant problems in our society. As the concentration of ownership in media has increased, the possibilities for public access have almost disappeared, and the ability and desire on the part of the mainstream media to provide comprehensive public affairs programming has decreased dramatically. A complete focus on the bottom line has consumed our most used channels of communication and has made controversial, painful, or merely unpredictable talk nearly impossible. Society is imagined only as a market--segmented and regimented for the purpose of selling advertising--and anything that shakes this foundation is rigorously avoided. As a result, the possibility of communication across the most difficult of social divisions is rarely possible through the media and it has become increasingly difficult out side of it. As Steve M. Barkin, who teaches journalism at the University of Maryland at College Park, has noted, "News has become dangerously market driven. In catering to the largest possible audiences, producers and reporters are led astray from their social and civic responsibilities."

During the O.J. trials, the anger directed at numerous institutions by a diverse coalition of people found its first nationally televised outlet in almost twenty years and highlighted the near absolute incomprehension in the comfortable elements of the middle class regarding the depth of anger within large segments of their own society. But when a televised event assumes centrality and is called a "debate" about social issues, this anger becomes distant and mediated; its causes become diffuse and abstract and are just far enough removed from their source to be comfortably ignored. Some things are too painful for candor, and some people are too angry for dialogue.

During a recent fundraising drive on WPFW, a mostly African American radio station in Washington, D.C., a producer played a tape that told the story of Rosewood, a small African American town in Florida which was attacked and burnt to the ground by the Ku Klux Klan more than seventy years ago while authorities stood by and did nothing. The tape was part of the soundtrack of a recent documentary narrated by James Earl Jones, which painstakingly tracks this story, through the words of people who were there, and the fight of the town's surviving residents and their descendants to gain reparations from the state of Florida. That this story could remain untold for most of this century is a sad commentary on the state of race relations in this country. But the fact that it has now been documented and made publicly available is a testament to what can be accomplished when regard for the truth is pursued without regard for the rewards which it may or may not bring. It is a powerful example for all of us to follow.

Charles Fairchild has written extensively on the media in Canada and the United States. He is currently preparing a book on community radio in both countries.