The two articles that you have for this week are focused on news reporting in the OJ Simpson case. My goal for this week is for us to talk about how media reporting can shape (and be shaped by) people’s everyday understandings of law. It is worth noting now that these authors do not write specifically about law. Nevertheless, we have plenty of previous readings on law that we can draw on to do the analysis ourselves.
Alderman’s article is about how the news industry went about reporting on the OJ case. He contends that there was “hypercoverage” -meaning that the OJ trial was reported on at the expense of other kinds of news. Alderman is a geographer and, as a result, his article emphasizes our OJ reporting shaped a national understand of the Los Angeles area. How do you think this hypercoverage affected our cultural understandings of law?
Hunt’s article is focused on how people perceived the OJ Simpson trial. He argues that understandings of the trial (and verdict) were “raced” – meaning that African Americans and whites had very different responses to and interpretations of the trial. We have talked about how various racial/ethnic groups experience the law differently. But for our discussion this week I would like to talk about how various racial/ethnic groups think differently about the law.