amous of magazine cover photos was one published by Time magazine, which showed a retouched police mug shot of Simpson: "The photograph had been altered to make him look darker and more menacing, the epitome of white America's stereotype of the violent and sexually aggressive black male."
The post-trial publicity of the Simpson case was also negative. The media were convinced that Simpson would be found guilty. When the jury submitted a verdict for acquittal, the media lashed out, making the jury the scapegoat. Many accused the jury of racial bias and Johnnie Cochran, Jr., Simpson's lead attorney, of the undue use of race as an issue in the trial. In trying to second-guess the jury, some of the media concluded that instead of focusing on Simpson's guilt or innocence, the jury was trying to send a message about racism or police corruption. Others in the media intimated that the jury (which consisted of mostly blacks) had lacked the intelligent to understand the importance of scientific evidence presented in the case: "At the end of the day, the editorials and slanted news articles shed much more light on the writers' ambivalence about blacks, and particularly about black males married to white females, than on the motives and meaning of the jury's verdict." Jurors soon found themselves in the position of defending not only their verdict but their personal integrities as well.
The media coverage of the Simpson trial was undignified given the gravity of the subject matter. Two people were brutally murdered and a man's future hung in the balance. But in many instances, the media exhibited a light-hearted treatment of the trial. Much of the information unearthed about the accused, the victims, their families, friends, and lifestyles amounted to gossip: "television, as is its habit, has taken the lea
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