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If "interactivity" was the media buzzword of the '90s, Mr. Higgins was its poster child. His prank call was network TV meeting public-access cable. It was the Internet, years before the Internet became popularized. That is, it was the battle cry of the universal mike-grab, for better and worse. It was tasteless and irresponsible and cruel, and it epitomized a decade in media when talking back to the TV would become an art form (see "Beavis and Butt-Head"), whose most representative voices would be those that offended proper sensibilities -- RuPaul, Roseanne, "Beavis," "South Park," the Farrelly brothers, Todd Solondz, Web sites like Salon and Drudge and, certainly, Howard Stern himself, who's both an unapologetic ass and a biting, smart commentator. Of course, that could have happened with any live event. There was something else about O.J. that made him the perfect leveler between the media and its audience -- he belonged to both of us. We tend to forget, after two trials and a thousand on-air excommunications of the man, that O.J.was not just a target of the media but a full-fledged member: not just a football star and pitchman but an ABC sportscaster who worked, lunched and played golf with the media elite -- he had gotten inside in a way that mere money didn't generally get a running back or a black American. James Poniewozik's column appears in Media, every Monday and Thursday Find books on O.J. Simpson at BARNES & NOBLE
So when newscasters covering the chase said, "We just don't want to believe that this man we've loved all his career can be guilty," that we had a couple of meanings. In one sense, the surface one, it was you: that big, fake, warm "we" that embraces the audience and wishes, now more wistfully than ever, for permission to speak for it. But in the other, subtextual sense, it was, emphatically, not you: It was we, the guys who wear the network blazers and the makeup. Soon enough, it would become de rigeur to swear him off -- soon Charles Grodin's career arc would take him from former star of "Beethoven" to crusading anti-O.J. fulminator to, well, former star of "Beethoven." But for the moment, broadcasters like ABC's Al Michaels and KCBS's Jim Hill reminisced about their friend and colleague and even broke the fourth wall to beg him to surrender. They drew aside the veil separating the audience from the Elysian 19th hole of sports greats and TV stars and reminded us that the white Bronco we were following wouldn't have looked out of place in their own driveways. It was a vulnerability they couldn't afford to maintain. O.J. knew this better than any of us, even as he knew that that world was all slipping away from him. During the chase, Michaels noted that O.J. had told him by cell phone the day before, "I have to get out of the media business." He kept that promise, on and off, willingly and not, over the next five years, vowing seclusion and selling a videotape; cutting himself off one day, phoning up TV talk shows out of the blue the next. From that Friday night on, however, the rest of us were in the media business to stay.
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