The Day News Learned You’d Come Back Tomorrow

This week marks the anniversary of the O.J. Bronco chase.

Most Americans couldn’t tell you the date. They remember the pictures and visuals, the white Ford Bronco, the helicopter shots, and the slow-moving police cars.

And if you’re of a certain age, you probably remember something else too: the NBA Finals getting shoved into a little box on the television screen because NBC couldn’t stop covering the chase. [I was throwing a house party with my roommates that night, we had a very small TV that about 40 people strained to watch]

There is also a certain species of Knicks fan who has spent the last three decades convinced O.J. somehow cost New York a championship.

It’s a wonderful theory if you believe in superstitions like that. It just doesn’t survive contact with the schedule. The Knicks won that night. Patrick Ewing had a double-double (25 and 12), New York beat Houston 91-84, and took a 3-2 lead in the series. Then they went to Houston and lost the next two games.

The white Bronco didn’t cost them a title. Hakeem Olajuwon did. Perhaps the Knicks were more distracted than the Rockets? Who knows for sure.

And now that New York has finally won another championship, fifty-three years after the last one, I suspect fewer people feel the need to preserve that particular wonder about 1994.

What has stayed with me about June 17 isn’t the basketball, though. It’s how differently that day looks from thirty-two years away than it did in the moment.

I started at The Hotline in 1992, so I’ve spent most of my professional life watching the media business evolve from the inside. I was there before O.J., before Fox News and MSNBC, before social media, before newsletters became a business model, and before algorithms became the editors of our daily lives. [The Hotline was the O.G. of the newsletter business that’s popular today, actually].

For years, I thought of the O.J. story the way most people did: a murder trial, a celebrity scandal, a race story, a media circus.

Looking back, I think it was one of those moments when an industry discovered something it couldn’t unlearn.

The Bronco chase proved Americans would stop what they were doing for a major story. The trial revealed something far more consequential. People didn’t just show up for the event; they came back for the process.

They returned for jury selection. They returned for testimony. They returned for arguments over evidence and legal strategy. And they returned for procedural fights that, on paper, sound like the sort of thing only lawyers should care about.

Yet millions of people cared.

The process itself had become the product.

America had obsessed over crime stories before. The Lindbergh kidnapping consumed the country. The accused kidnapper’s trial generated extraordinary attention for its era. Human beings have always been fascinated by mystery, celebrity, scandal, and conflict.

What O.J. demonstrated wasn’t that America could become obsessed. It demonstrated that television could build a business around the obsession.

The timing mattered.

Cable news was already growing, and CNN had spent years proving there was an audience for twenty-four-hour news coverage. But O.J. showed something different. It showed that viewers could develop a habit around a single story; that they would rearrange their schedules and return day after day to follow developments that weren’t necessarily dramatic on their own, but became compelling because they were part of an ongoing narrative.

CNN’s ratings surged. So did its revenues. That’s where I think we sometimes misremember what happened next.

When people tell the story of Fox News and MSNBC, they often tell it entirely through politics. Politics eventually became central to both networks and ultimately defining. But before either network was a political project, it was a business decision.

Executives looked at CNN’s growth and saw an opportunity.

O.J. didn’t create Fox News or MSNBC, nor did it single-handedly put them on the air. What it did do was help validate the idea that twenty-four-hour news could be something more than a public-service mission. It could be a growth business.

By 1996, both networks had launched.

At The Hotline, we happened to occupy a useful perch for watching this transition unfold. Our audience wasn’t the general public. It was the professional political class — campaign managers, consultants, reporters, congressional staffers, elected officials and people whose jobs required them to understand not just what Americans were talking about, but why.

That’s why we paid attention to stories like O.J., Chandra Levy and Terri Schiavo. Not because we confused them with legislation, wars, or elections.

We covered them because the coverage itself was becoming politically relevant.

One of the things we could see more clearly than most was how quickly television narratives spread. A story would catch on one network, competitors would follow, producers would chase similar angles, and before long, the coverage itself became part of the event. Looking back, I think we were watching an ecosystem learn how to feed itself.

The names changed over the years. The dynamic felt familiar.

Lewinsky.

Chandra Levy.

Terri Schiavo.

Casey Anthony.

The missing Malaysian airliner.

Each story was different. Each deserved to be evaluated on its own merits. But all of them lived inside a media environment that had become increasingly skilled at sustaining attention over time.

And somewhere along the way, another boundary started to erode.

The line between news, entertainment, celebrity culture, and public life became harder to see.

One of the lawyers standing beside O.J. Simpson was Robert Kardashian. At the time, he was a supporting character in somebody else’s story.

A decade later, the Kardashian family had become one of the most successful media franchises in the world. That sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud.

But it is also revealing. Strangely, Keeping Up with the Kardashians was the Frasier to O.J.’s Cheers.

Popular television shows used to produce spinoffs. O.J. managed to produce one too.

The point isn’t that the trial created the Kardashians. The point is that public life itself was becoming serialized.

At roughly the same time, reality television was taking off. Survivor, American Idol, The Apprentice, and countless other formats were discovering their own versions of the same lesson. Recurring characters matter. Audiences become invested in conflict. Stories that unfold over time create a different kind of attachment than stories that arrive, resolve, and disappear.

Cable news was discovering those incentives. Reality television was discovering those incentives.

Politics eventually operated inside them.

Which brings us to Trump.

I don’t think Donald Trump is the product of O.J. Simpson any more than Fox News is the product of O.J. Simpson. History is rarely that neat. But Trump arrived at a moment when certain media incentives had become deeply embedded. Long before he ran for president, he had spent decades navigating tabloids, television, branding, and reality TV. He understood intuitively that attention had become an asset in its own right.

Traditional politicians often treated attention as a vehicle for delivering a message. Trump understood that attention itself had value.

By the time he entered presidential politics, much of the media business had spent twenty years refining systems that rewarded conflict, strong personalities, recurring narratives, and emotional engagement. Trump fit comfortably inside that environment, which helps explain why he dominated coverage so thoroughly.

That’s why the famous Les Moonves quote from 2016 has always stayed with me.

“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

People heard cynicism. I heard candor. Moonves wasn’t really explaining Trump. He was describing an industry that had increasingly learned to measure success through engagement.

Then social media arrived and accelerated everything. Like others, I at first gave more credit to Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok for creating the attention economy. It turns out that was NOT true. They inherited many of its assumptions, though.

What they changed was the speed, the scale, and the precision. Television had already demonstrated that attention could be renewed. Algorithms figured out how to renew it continuously.

Looking back now, that’s why June 17, 1994, feels more significant than it did at the time.

Most of us thought we were watching a remarkable story.

In reality, we were also watching the early stages of a transformation in how stories would be produced, distributed, consumed, and monetized.

Nobody sitting in front of a television that night could have predicted exactly where any of this would lead. Nobody was thinking about Fox News or MSNBC (they didn’t exist). Nobody was thinking about reality television becoming a dominant force in American culture. And certainly, nobody was imagining that a future president would arrive with a reality-TV understanding of how attention works. And nobody was anticipating a world in which algorithms would learn how to deliver each of us a personalized version of whatever keeps us engaged.

Those developments did not emerge from O.J., and they didn’t all emerge for the same reasons. But they were all operating inside an environment that increasingly rewarded the same thing: the ability to capture attention, sustain attention, and renew attention.

The story ended. The business model never did.

Author’s note: This column is based on a segment I put together for the June 15 episode of the Time Machine feature on The ChuckToddCast.