Media and U.S. Cultural Values

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The Media Commercialization of O .J . Simpson Trial

The famous and much commercialized trial case of O .J . Simpson was a clear illustration of the commercial culture of the Americans . O .J Simpson , before his murder trial , was a popular entertainment figure and celebrity . He was a celebrated athlete , a film star and famous commercial endorser . The O .J . Simpson trial case made many media people rich . It indeed became one of the most saleable stories of all time wherein television networks , tabloids , books and

magazines reaped a huge amount of money . CNN alone increased fifty percent of their revenues by running the story of Simpson . Commercial experts had confessed to Advertising Age reporters that Simpson- related marketing can produce as much as 1 billion in media and merchandising sales Dines Humez 178 . It is no wonder then how much the media pursued the case of Simpson , leaving no stones unturned for any possible angle of the story to make it more interesting . But the main interest had been sales ' from beginning to the end of the trial . Simpson 's story increased TV ratings while books , tabloids and magazines attracted potential buyers . But then the question is this : why does Simpson 's case generate a lot of money ? And what does this reflect of the kind of society that would make such an amount possible ? Americans makes television a center of their lives . And their minds are conditioned to the shows that they watched . According to...