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Decisions in a debacle

Thursday, November 23, 2006

With thudding inevitability, ghouls with a refined sense of disgust can today get O.J Simpson’s “If I Did It” on eBay. The price? At five o’clock this morning it stood at $65,100. Officially, meanwhile, some 400,000 copies are supposed to be trundling into the incinerator.

It seems even Rupert Murdoch’s legendarily strong stomach, and his even harder head, have limits, in that he personally canned what he called this “ill-considered” plan from the Regan Books imprint of his publishing unit HarperCollins. And just in case you’re wondering – oh yes, Murdoch certainly knew of it in advance. And of the Fox Network’s pair of TV specials in which, as interviewer as well as publisher, Judith Regan supposedly extracts what she believes is a confession (albeit in “hypothetical” terms) from Simpson.

Amid the corporate flailing, before finally caving in to public outrage, overall owners News Corporation did try to placate the murder victims’ relatives with a financial deal, prompting Nicole Brown Simpson’s sister Denise Brown – though not Ron Goldman’s family lawyer - to label it “hush money”. But of course to no avail.

What’s to be done now, since so many copies of the book have already shipped out from the printers, and the interview material inescapably exists on video? The Goldmans hope to shame News Corp further into handing over the rights to the whole horrible caboodle - but of course that, even if agreed, is no guarantee at all that Simpson won’t soon end up running rampant through our salacious, unmediated media. His latest spewing became unstaunchable, once Judith Regan made her original “ill-considered” decision. (I’ve previously spent some time on Regan’s questionable decision-making, not least her personal involvement with another disgraced “author” of hers – Bernard Kerik).

Here as in previous media debacles, I turned for simple good sense to the publishing world’s veteran agent Esther Newberg. She said, referring to Regan and her corporate bosses: “I would hope that they have to reconsider whether she should be publishing ANY books, given this incredibly poor decision”.

Fat chance at News Corp. Their spokesman Andrew Butcher says “We’re not a company that’s big on recriminations … We’d rather admit our mistakes and move on”.



I COULD FIND LITTLE AROUND THANKSGIVING last year to be thankful for in America’s media landscape, except the abiding presence of CBS’s Mike Wallace – and I gratefully celebrated his continuance. Since then of course Mike has actually retired (though when I phoned him recently he was closeted in an interview-taping session – he’s a hard man to stop).

How sadly wrong it seems that his (considerably younger) 60 Minutes colleague Ed Bradley has been stopped – by leukemia. This year’s Thanksgiving week has been marked by New York’s massive Riverside Church being given over to memorializing this extraordinary television reporter.

The place was packed, of course – and rightly, we heard of the Fall of Saigon, of racist murders in the American south, of abuse in the Catholic Church, of AIDS in Africa, of trailblazing in the vanguard of black journalists, of the scooping of furious rivals, of trenchant interviews with the famous and the criminal. And just as rightly, we heard Wynton Marsalis and some raucous New Orleans brass players blast the roof timbers with a grateful send-off.

Thanksgiving indeed.