No One Can Figure Out What to Say About O.J. Simpson

RIP to a football star and acquitted murderer, usually in that order.

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We’ve spent the last six months seeing the nauseating ways in which the media can massage and finesse language to arrive at whatever predetermined point it wants to make. So it’s funny, in a way, to see all the top news organizations fall all over themselves utterly failing at figuring out what to say about O.J. Simpson, who died on Wednesday at 76.

If you take a survey of all the big obituaries about Simpson—who was acquitted in 1995 of the brutal double murder of Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, whose family has ever since been saddled with the heart-wrenching task of reminding the public that two people were killed that day—you will find a very clear pattern.

Let’s see what the newspaper of record has to say (emphasis mine throughout, and pay close attention to the order in which Simpson’s many achievements appear):

From the Times’ story:

O.J. Simpson, who ran to fame on the football field, made fortunes as an all-American in movies, television and advertising, and was acquitted of killing his former wife and her friend in a 1995 trial in Los Angeles that mesmerized the nation, died on Wednesday at his home in Las Vegas. He was 76.

That Oxford comma sure is doing a lot of work! Pretty wild to list the murders after his role in The Naked Gun movies, but okay!!

This kind of thing is everywhere today. Let’s see how The Guardian tackled (football reference) this moral imbroglio.