Going from the taped piece back to being live in the studio, I said, “He’s the sweetest man. I mean, I was just overwhelmed by him and the level of forgiveness and understanding that he was able to have toward the people who beat the living daylights out of him for no reason…he’s an incredibly special person.”
And it’s true—he was an incredibly special person. But watching the interview today makes me squirm.
As does much of the coverage, which focused on the sensational details, like the graphic violence and the nearly $800 million in property damage. Bryant did the best he could to tease out underlying attitudes and misconceptions when he interviewed one of the jurors who’d acquitted the LAPD cops, a woman who explained that Rodney King “was directing the action. He was the one who determined how long it took to put him in handcuffs.”
“At what point when he was lying there taking blows do you think he lost control of the action?” Bryant asked.
I’m writing these words in the wake of George Floyd. As our eyes have finally been pinned wide open to the systemic injustice that has derailed the lives of Black people since slavery, I am appalled at the cluelessness I now see in the way we covered the Rodney King story （starting with the optics—many carefully coiffed, white correspondents delivering their uninflected reports）。 No one, myself included, was able to interrogate what any of this was actually about on a societal level. Almost no one could ask hard, sustained, well-informed questions about the source of the anger. Instead, we dedicated major airtime—a two-part interview—to the plight of the white victim. （Why do you think we committed so many hours to stories like Laci Peterson, Natalee Holloway, and Trisha Meili, the Central Park jogger? Tragic victims, yes, but pretty white women all. I never heard anyone say it explicitly, but I know it was assumed that’s what most viewers wanted to see, and the predominantly white people behind the scenes complied.）
It’s hard to be an apologist for what those four men did to Reginald Denny, on display in all its viciousness, just as it was with the cops who beat Rodney King. To this day, the footage makes me want to throw up. Denny was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and those men were out for blood and worse. And yet I come back to the word clueless. The cluelessness of growing up in a de facto segregated Virginia suburb, being friendly with the Black girls I ran track with, girls I loved…yet I never went to their houses in the “Black part of town” （Halls Hill, behind the McDonald’s）。 The cluelessness—no, malevolence—of a fraternity at UVA having pledges work as waiters in blackface. I was at that party. I was disgusted, and yet at the time I didn’t have the guts to just get up and leave. The cluelessness, born of intractable white privilege, about institutional racism—about redlining and voter suppression and predatory lending and maternal mortality and the criminal justice system and police brutality.
As educated and progressive as many of us in the mainstream media thought ourselves to be in the ’90s, very few had the awareness or life experience to provide any nuance about what was happening and push the reporting to go deeper. It was: white trucker good, Black assailants bad. Case closed. Thinking about it now mortifies me.
A DEEPLY DISTURBING OVERCORRECTION would come two years later in the form of OJ Simpson. I’d met OJ and Nicole during the Barcelona Olympics in ’92 as they were getting off a hotel elevator; I remember thinking how beautiful Nicole was. OJ and I had been photographed together when I covered the First Gulf War and he was visiting the troops. Both times he was gregarious, radiating charisma. He hosted an NFL pregame show with Bob Costas, which made him a member of the NBC family.
Five days after Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman were brutally murdered outside her Brentwood home, the Knicks faced the Houston Rockets in game five of the playoffs. I’m not a big basketball fan but Jay badly wanted to go. Of course there were no seats left at Madison Square Garden, but Dick Ebersol came through, and arranged for us to sit with Bob on the platform he was broadcasting from, behind one of the baskets.
Things got weird fast. It started rippling through the stands that a phalanx of LAPD cruisers was on the 405 tailing a white Ford Bronco carrying Simpson, with his friend and former Buffalo Bills teammate Al Cowlings at the wheel. Suddenly, Bob was toggling between game commentary from Marv Albert and updates from the news division on the bizarre scene playing out in LA, along with images of the SUV looking like some ghost car headed for the abyss. （NBC normally would have just stayed on the breaking news, but a playoff game, especially between teams from two really big markets, was ratings gold. Not even a real-time drama involving a big celebrity was going to get in the way of that.）