In almost record time for this kind of thing, I have reached my saturation level of the Michael Jackson matter. With O.J., there came a time when I said to myself, "Self…if you try to follow this thing, you won't get any work done for months." The reason was not so much the trial as the case itself and the ancillary exploitation. There was such a public curiosity about that trial, and a willingness to watch and buy as much of it as they could get that the media complied and made it as voluminous as possible, dragging in peripheral matters, examining details to the nth degree and turning out a parade of "experts" who all wanted a piece of it. (As you can guess, I think we're too quick to fault the press for giving us that for which we create a market. If we didn't tune in and buy it, they wouldn't offer as much.)
L'Affaire O.J. case fascinated America because it had everything: Sex, race, drugs, a movie star, colorful hangers-on, rich people…even sports and a dog. The Jackson trial, assuming there is one, will have most of those same categories. As with O.J., there will be days when every single new development can be summarized in under five minutes, but Larry King will still try to fill sixty, while Fox, MSNBC and Court TV will devote whole days plus a nightly recap. We'll have books. We'll have dramatizations. We'll have "experts," many of them former O.J. experts who've been biding their time with less stellar tragedies like Jon Benet, Gary Condit, Robert Blake and Laci Peterson. At the end, regardless of the verdict, most of America will be asking, "Do you think he did it?"
You can watch if you want but I've decided to pay as little attention to it as I can. Check in regularly here to see if I make it.