American Public to O.J. Simpson: Drop Dead

The Interview That Never Was: O.J. Simpson and Judith Reagan

America has become a nation of such exerable bad taste that it was gratifying that media baron Rupert Murdoch, the king of scandal, has however belatedly pulled the plug on a book and TV interview with O.J. Simpson in which the man widely regarded as the killer was going to tell how he might have murdered his former wife and her friend.

By the time Murdoch acted, booksellers had returned to HarperCollins over 70,000 copies of Simpson’s stillborn "I Did It."

Said a HarperCollins exec:

"The accounts were treating the book as if it was pornography."

News of the book and interview prompted calls for boycotts and numerous TV stations said they would refuse to carry the program. And Denise Brown, Nicole's older sister, said that the publisher tried to silence the Brown and Goldman families with millions in hush money.

Murdoch gets no credit because it's obvious that he could have pulled the plug on the project months ago if he had scruples.

What he does have is an eye for making buckets of money, and he saw the book and interview as a big fat profit center that would create a tremendous amount of controversy and make a tremendous amount of money.

His News Corporation controls the Fox network, which was going to air an interview next week with Simpson conducted by Judith Reagan, whose ReaganBooks, a subsidiary of News Corporation's HarperCollins, published "If I Did It."

Said Murdoch:

"I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project. We are sorry for any pain this has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson."

Right.

News Corporation execs apparently had forgotten that projects involving The Juice have met with public outrage in the 11 years since he was acquitted of the two murders following the so-called Trial of the Century. He later was found responsible for the deaths in a civil trial and ordered to pay $33.5 million to the victims’ families.

When the controversy broke, I put in my two-cents worth here as a journalist who covered both trials. David Scott Anderson, who blogs at In Search of Utopia, knew Simpson back in the day and like many African Americans had believed him to be innocent. Why he has changed his mind is worth reading.