How OJ Simpson’s murder trial changed the TV news business
The double-murder case against football star and actor O.J. Simpson, who died of cancer Thursday at age 76, forever transformed the TV landscape.
Network news was still a buttoned-down institution in 1994, when more than 30 million viewers were tuning into the evening newscasts each night. The anchors of the time — Tom Brokaw on NBC, Peter Jennings on ABC and Dan Rather on CBS — were powerful arbiters of what the public needed to know.
The internet was nascent and CNN, available in about half the country on cable, was considered a tier below the Big Three networks.
But the landscape changed on June 17, 1994, the day of the wild slow-speed police
