Twenty years ago this week, Nicole Brown Simpson, the wife of former football great and sports commentator O. J. Simpson, was found murdered in her Los Angeles home, along with her friend Ronald Lyle Goldman. The Simpson chase, arrest and trial, played out in real time before a live television audience, forever changed how we consume news.
"Before the killings on June 12, 1994," writes media critic Kent Babb, "CNN was 14 years old and had a foothold in households but wasn’t yet appointment viewing; Court TV was a startup network with a niche of drawing legal die-hards into courtrooms. Fox News and MSNBC were two years from their cable debuts. Prime-time programming in those days consisted of scripted entertainment; no one then could imagine that, two decades into the future, televising the trivialities of daily life would captivate the public." Courtesy The Washington Post. Subscription or pay-per-view may be required.