Simpson’s TV Trial a Boost for Newt’s Populist Visions

I stayed home Thursday to watch the Simpson murder trial on television, not for the pictures and words as much as to check out something called interactive TV.

It’s a dialogue between the viewers and the anchor, the hottest thing on the amorphous road called the information superhighway where people communicate, share opinions and even fall in love.

The superhighway and its various side roads are the linchpin of House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s conservative new world. As Newt sees the 21st-Century United States, public policy would be determined by Americans voicing their opinions to lawmakers on the computer-based information superhighway and on call-ins to talk radio, television shows and to C-Span, the cable network that covers Congress.

I’m an occasional traveler on the highway, taking part in TimesLink’s computer discussions of the Simpson case. It’s technology with great potential, but in an infant stage, comparable to the early days of radio when a relatively small number of people prowled the airwaves with their crystal sets, the vanguard of a communications revolution that changed the world.

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A hot place for interactive Simpson coverage is the 5-year-old E! cable network, which covers the entertainment industry and decided early this year to go live with the trial.

“It’s the biggest entertainment story,” said executive producer John Rieber. And the pretrial hearings had proved popular with the E! audience, which tends to be youngish and female.

On Thursday, as usual, trial coverage anchor Kathleen Sullivan sat behind a large desk all day, along with lawyer commentators, Christine Dalton in the morning and, in the afternoon, Prof. Isabelle Gunning and Charles Rosenberg, author of “The Trial of O.J.,” a viewers guide to watching the proceedings.

Sullivan was the first Olympics woman anchor in 1984 and helped cover the games in 1992. She was also anchor for the “CBS Morning News” until she was fired in 1990. The word in the industry was that she had gained too much weight, which seemed to be confirmed when she became spokeswoman for Weight Watchers. “One moment, I’m a network anchor and the next, well, look at me,” she said in a commercial that launched a Weight Watchers regime in which she lost 30 pounds.

She has also known fellow USC alum Simpson for more than 20 years. In fact, they played in the Sinatra golf tournament two years ago. And they covered the Olympics together.

All that went into the mix when E! decided to have her anchor the trial. “She had insight into his lifestyle, the celebrity lifestyle, she had a strong journalistic background and she had rapport with the audience,” said producer Rieber.

In many respects, the E! coverage is conventional. The network picks up the courtroom feed and puts it on the air. What makes it different is the heavy audience participation through phone calls, faxes and the Prodigy and America Online computer networks.

Thursday, Rosa Lopez, the former housekeeper at the Brentwood home next to Simpson’s, was on the witness stand, provoking a sharp viewer reaction.

“I think Rosa Lopez is a liar,” said a phone caller named Jack. “Why do you think she’s a liar?” Sullivan asked. “That’s a harsh thing to say, Jack.”

Another caller, Melanie, said, “Chris Darden is very condescending toward her.”

“Very insensitive,” another viewer said of Darden.

The trick to Sullivan’s job is to keep the show informal without having it descend to the level of “Talk Soup,” the network’s weekly compilation of the worst of bad taste TV talk shows.

Sullivan tries to give the show an edge. The week before, I had interviewed her at the station after the trial adjourned. “We are not uncomfortable with picking up a tabloid and talking about it or having a doggie psychiatrist on,” she said. Dogs, you’ll recall, figure prominently in the case. The prosecution insists that the howling of a dog pinpointed the time of the murders. The defense says housekeeper Lopez saw Simpson’s Bronco parked at his house at that time--a sighting she made while walking a dog.

On the day a witness said Simpson had told him of dreaming of killing Nicole Brown Simpson, Sullivan “had everyone fax me the dream you are afraid will be used against you in court.”

When the attorneys were putting on wireless microphones, Sullivan said that she knew, from her own experience, that Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark would have trouble because of the design of her suit. Clark, said Sullivan, “will either have to go to the restroom or expose herself.”

Not everyone, however, is a Sullivan fan. One day, I checked the E! bulletin board on Prodigy and found this comment: “Could we have more news and less of Miss Sullivan’s opinions? I switch stations when she will not let the experts answer the very questions she has asked them.”

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With its intense viewer interest, and its coterie of devoted electronic trial watchers, the Simpson trial has given interactive television a real boost. “Rivera Live” on the CNBC network also receives phone calls and computer messages. Like E!, Geraldo Rivera’s show conducts daily polls on subjects such as “How would you rate Judge Ito’s performance in recent weeks?”

If the believers in interactive TV have it right, this is a window on the future, not just of the covering of trials, but for public policy events.

It will be Newt politics, talk show politics, politics with an edge, as rowdy, rude and populist as a frontier political meeting.