Exonerating the Hero

This paper analyses Australian media coverage of the arrest of former American football superstar O J Simpson for the murders of his ex-wife and one of her friends. We found that the Simpson story was framed in three main ways: as the rise and fall of an American hero; as an event produced by and typical of Hollywood and Los Angeles; and as a media feeding frenzy. We then draw upon both modernist and postmodernist narrative theories to interpret these three frames and to discuss their implications for the coverage and reception of the story. We argue that the general 'ideological effects' of these two sets of narrative processes were to exonerate Simpson's individual acts of violence against his former wife and to exscript men's violence against women as a 'normal' aspect of hegemonic masculinity.