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NBC News Headline on O.J. Simpson Is Even Worse Than the AP’s – Twitchy

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As we reported earlier, people are mocking the AP’s ridiculous headline announcing the death of O.J. Simpson:

Nicole Brown Simpson nearly lost her head. Excuse us if we don’t see Simpson as the victim here.

In a true “hold my beer” move, NBC News decided to come up with an even worse take.

Seriously? As we reported Marc Lamont Hill posted that O.J. Simpson was a monster and most definitely guilty of murder, but his acquittal was “the correct and necessary result of a racist criminal legal system.” A lot of us don’t see it that way. But NBC News, writing under its NBC BLK imprint, reminds of of how Simpson’s downfall was a symbol of something deeper to many black Americans.

Michelle Garcia reports:

With the trial’s every detail broadcast in wall-to-wall coverage on cable news — a pure anomaly at the time — Simpson’s downfall symbolized something deeper to many Black people, particularly with the 1992 L.A. riots still fresh in their minds. 

“The African American community has accepted him not as an athlete or a hero, but as someone in the criminal justice system who, like them, would have been railroaded, they would say, if he had not had a Johnnie Cochran there to rescue him,” said Charles Ogletree Jr., a Harvard Law School professor who told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2005 that as Simpson became more successful, he seemed to become increasingly disjointed from Blackness. (Cochran was a key member of Simpson’s legal defense team.)

“O.J. Simpson was raceless,” said Ogletree who founded Harvard’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice and died last year. “He was not a person who spent time in African American communities. He was not a person who was deeply committed to African American values.” 

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Hill said something similar, saying that Simpson had abandoned his community long before the double murder. And yet, as Garcia reports, “‘Everybody was running out of their house, screaming and happy,’ recalled journalist and cultural critic Jasmyne Cannick, who was a teenager living near Compton when the verdict came down,” adding, “‘He symbolized the Black man and the criminal justice system at the time,’ Cannick said. ‘Him beating the case, at the time, was everybody beating the case. We finally won one.'”

Simspon got away with murder, literally, but at least “we finally won one.”

The intense era of the civil rights movement was in the 1960s. What kind of take is this? Simpson wasn’t considered black, but blacks celebrated when he got away with murder because he’d beaten the racist justice system. Is that what we’re supposed to take from this?

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