The year brought a burst of contrived giddiness and worldwide extravagance that would be unthinkable today: that’s because the hoopla was about the release of a computer operating system, Microsoft’s Windows 95. Microsoft reportedly spent $300 million48 to preface the launch with weeks of marketing hype.49 So successful was it that, even among computer illiterates, Windows 95 became a topic of conversation.50
The company spent millions for rights to the Rolling Stones hit “Start Me Up,” which became the anthem for the Windows 95 launch.51 It bought out the print run of the venerable Times of London on August 24, the day of the launch, and gave away the newspapers—fattened with advertising for Windows 95.52 A huge banner, stretching some thirty stories and proclaiming “Microsoft Windows 95,” was suspended from the landmark CN Tower in Toronto.53 In New York, the Empire State Building was illuminated in three of Microsoft’s four corporate colors—the first time a company’s colors had so bathed the Manhattan skyscraper.54
FIGURE 3. Microsoft’s launch of its Windows 95 computer operating software in late August 1995 was preceded by weeks of hype and hoopla in the United States and abroad.
Not since “the first landing on the moon—or, at any rate, since the last Super Bowl—has America been more aflutter,” a U.S.-based correspondent for London’s Independent newspaper wrote about the Windows 95 fuss, his tongue decidedly in cheek.55 It was easy to lampoon the hype. After all, said the New York Times a few weeks before the launch, “It is not a lunar landing or the cure for disease. It is simply an improved version of a computer’s operating system—like a more efficient transmission for a car.”56 Barely heard above the din was Apple Computer’s rather cheeky counter-campaign, which pointed out that many features of Windows 95 were already available on Macintosh machines. “Been there, done that,” Apple proclaimed in its publicity. Even so, Apple in 1995 commanded only about 8 percent of the computer market.57
The hoopla was as inescapable as Microsoft’s objective was obvious—to establish Windows 95 as the industry standard and encourage users to move from the older Windows 3 platforms and promptly embrace the new operating system.58 The big day finally came and, just after midnight on August 24 in Auckland, New Zealand, a nineteen-year-old student named Jonathan Prentice made the first purchase of Windows 95. As midnight approached in New York City, “a jostling scrum of technophiles” was reported outside a mid-Manhattan computer store, waiting to buy the software as it went on sale.59 But it was not as if consumers were strung out in blocks-long lines to buy the product. At some computer stores that opened at midnight on August 24, employees had the place pretty much to themselves thirty minutes or so after Windows 95 went on sale.60
After the initial surge in late summer, sales of Windows 95 began to tail off. By December 1995, sales were about a third of what they had been in September. Many consumers, it turned out, chose not to buy and install the software themselves—an often-exasperating task—but waited to adopt it when it came bundled with their next computers.61 Even so, the launch of Windows 95 easily qualified as “the splashiest, most frenzied, most expensive introduction of a computer product” up to that time, as a New York Times writer put it.62 The manufactured extravagance was more than a little silly, but the product did turn out to be a memorable one. Nearly twenty years later, technology writer Walter Mossberg included Windows 95 as one of the dozen “most influential” technology products he had reviewed for the Wall Street Journal since the early 1990s.63
Some of the launch-related giddiness can be laid to consumers’ embrace of the personal computer as a mainstay device in the workplace and at home.64 By 1995, a majority of Americans were using computers at home, at work, or at school, the Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press reported. The organization figured that eighteen million American homes in 1995 had computers equipped with modems, an increase of 64 percent from 1994.65 The popularity of the computer and the prevalence of modems helped ignite dramatic growth in Internet use in the years following 1995.
The hoopla over Windows 95 was also illustrative of the hyperbole afoot in 1995 about things digital. The hype spawned sweeping predictions, such as those by James K. Glassman, a syndicated columnist who wrote that computers “could displace schools, offices, newspapers, scheduled television and banks (though probably not dry cleaners). Government’s regulatory functions could weaken, or vanish. . . . Even collecting taxes could become nearly impossible when all funds are transferred by electronic impulses that can be disguised.”66 Even more expansive was Nicholas Negroponte, founding director of MIT’s Media Lab and a prominent tech guru in 1995. Negroponte argued that the real danger was to be found in not enough hype—in understating the importance of the emergent digital world. “I think the Internet is one of the rare, if not unique, instances where ‘hype’ is accompanied by understatement, not overstatement,” he said67 shortly before publication of his best-selling book, Being Digital. The book was a provocative clarion call, an assertion that a profound and far-reaching transformation was under way. “Like a force of nature,” Negroponte wrote, “the digital age cannot be denied or stopped.”68
His book, essentially a repurposing of columns written for Wired magazine, was not a flawless road map to the unfolding digital age; it was not a precision guide to what lay ahead. Negroponte, for example, had almost nothing to say about the Internet’s World Wide Web. Some of the book’s bold projections proved entertainingly wrong, or premature by years. Negroponte asserted that it was not at all far-fetched to expect “that twenty years from now you will be talking to a group of eight-inch-high holographic assistants walking across your desk,” serving as “interface agents” with computers.69 He suggested that by 2000 the unadventurous wristwatch would “migrate from a mere timepiece today to a mobile command-and-control center tomorrow. . . . An all-in-one, wrist-mounted TV, computer, and telephone is no longer the exclusive province of Dick Tracy, Batman, or Captain Kirk.”70
In other predictions, Being Digital was impressively clairvoyant—spot on, or nearly so. Negroponte anticipated “a talking navigational system” for automobiles.71 He discussed a “robot secretary that can fit in your pocket,” something of a nod to the Siri speech-recognition function of the contemporary iPhone.72 He rather seemed to foresee iPads, or Smartphones with bendable screens,73 in ruminating about “an electronic newspaper” delivered to “a magical, paper-thin, flexible, water-proof, wireless, lightweight, bright display.”74 Video on demand, he wrote, would destroy the video-rental business. “I think videocassette rental stores will go out of business in less than ten years,” a prediction not extravagantly far off.75
Negroponte notably anticipated a profound reshaping in the access to news, from one-way to interactive. Invoking “bits,” the smallest components of digital information, he wrote: “Being digital will change the nature of mass media from a process of pushing bits at people to one of allowing people (or their computers) to pull at them. This is a radical change.”76 He was hardly alone in foreseeing the digital challenge to traditional mass media. In February 1995, Editor & Publisher, the newspaper industry’s trade publication, had this to say in a special section devoted to “Interactive Newspapers”: “The Internet may be a tough lesson that some newspapers won’t survive. It is more than just another method of distribution. It represents an enormous opportunity in the field of communications that’s neither easy to describe nor easy to grasp.” The emergent online world, the article noted, “is truly the Wild West. Only this time there are a lot more Indians and they aren’t about to give up the land. They are dictating to us what they want to see in our online offerings.”77
Such warnings were largely unheeded. No industry in 1995 was as ill-prepared for the digital age, or more inclined to pooh-pooh the disruptive potential of the Internet and World Wide Web, than the news business. It suffered from what might be called “innovation blindness”:78 an inability, or a disinclination, to anticipate and understand the consequences of new media technology. Leading f
igures in American journalism took comfort in the comparatively small audiences for online news in 1995. Among them was Gene Roberts, the managing editor of the New York Times who, during the 1980s, had become a near-legend in American journalism for transforming the Philadelphia Inquirer into one of the country’s finest daily newspapers. In remarks to the Overseas Press Club meeting in New York in January 1995, Roberts declared: “The number of people in any given community, in percentage terms, who are willing to get their journalism interactively is—blessedly, I say as a print person—very slim and likely to be for some time.”79 Roberts was right, but not for long. Just 4 percent of adult Americans went online for news at least once during the week in 1995.80 But that was the starting point: within five years, more than 20 percent of adult Americans would turn regularly to the Internet for news.81
The Internet’s challenge to traditional media was not wholly ignored or scoffed at in 1995. In April, representatives of eight major U.S. newspaper companies announced the formation of the New Century Network.82 It was meant to be a robust, collaborative response to the challenges the Internet raised. As it turned out, New Century was emblematic of traditional news media’s confusion about the digital challenge. “In the spring of 1995,” the New York Times later observed, “a partnership of large newspaper companies formed the New Century Network to bring the country’s dailies into the age of the Internet. Then they sat down to figure out what that meant.”83
FIGURE 4. Internet adoption. Internet use has surged in America since 1995, when just 14 percent of adults were online. By 2013, that figure had reached 85 percent. (Source: Pew Research Center)
New Century’s principal project was a Web-based news resource called NewsWorks, through which affiliated newspapers, large and small, would share content. But NewsWorks was seen as competitive with the online news ventures that member newspaper companies had set up on their own.84 In March 1998, New Century was abruptly dissolved, an abject failure that has been mostly forgotten.85
Wildly popular among some mid-sized American newspapers in 1995 was a fad known as “public” or “civic” journalism.86 It was a quasi-activist phenomenon in which newspapers presumed they could rouse a lethargic or indifferent public and serve as a stimulus and focal point for rejuvenating civic culture. The wisdom of “public” journalism was vigorously debated by news organizations,87 but the disputes were largely beside the point. In a digital landscape, audiences could be both consumers and generators of news. They would not need news organizations to foster or promote civic engagement. Whatever its merits, “public” journalism suggested how far mainstream journalism had strayed from truly decisive questions in the field in 1995.
None of the missteps by American news organizations in 1995 was as humiliating as network television’s capitulation to heavy-handed tactics of the tobacco industry. In August 1995, ABC News publicly apologized for reports broadcast on its primetime Day One news program in 1994 that tobacco companies Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds routinely spiked cigarettes by injecting extra nicotine during their manufacturing. The companies sued for defamation; Philip Morris asked for $10 billion in damages, and R. J. Reynolds sought an unspecified amount.
To settle the case—which some analysts said the network stood a strong chance of winning—ABC agreed to the apology, which was read on its World News Tonight program and at halftime of an exhibition game on Monday Night Football.88 Philip Morris celebrated its victory by placing full-page advertisements in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. “Apology accepted,” the ads declared in large, bold type. The ads incorporated a facsimile of ABC’s written apology, which read in part: “We now agree that we should not have reported that Philip Morris adds significant amounts of nicotine from outside sources. That was a mistake.”89
Fears were that ABC’s climb-down would exert a chilling effect on aggressive coverage of the tobacco industry90—fears that seemed to be confirmed when CBS canceled plans in November 1995 to broadcast an explosive interview in which Jeffrey S. Wigand, a former tobacco industry executive, sharply criticized the industry’s practices. Wigand was the most senior tobacco industry executive to turn whistleblower. But the network’s lawyers feared CBS could be sued for billions of dollars for inducing Wigand to break a confidentiality agreement that barred disclosure of internal information about his former employer.91 No news organization had ever been found liable on such grounds. But the lawyers were adamant, and the interview with Wigand was pulled.
The interview was to have been shown on the newsmagazine program 60 Minutes, which prided itself on its aggressive and challenging reporting. Mike Wallace, the star journalist of 60 Minutes who had interviewed Wigand, said the ABC News settlement and apology had figured decisively in the CBS decision. “It has not chilled us as journalists, but it has chilled lawyers,” Wallace said, adding, “It has chilled management.”92 Wigand, formerly the vice president for research and development at Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation, said in the interview that his former employer included in pipe tobacco an additive suspected of causing cancer in laboratory animals. Wigand also accused the chief executive of Brown & Williamson of lying to Congress about the addictive nature of cigarettes.93
Months later, after the Wall Street Journal published details of Wigand’s deposition in a lawsuit in Mississippi, CBS finally put the suppressed interview on the air. By then, its impact had been blunted, and CBS was subjected to withering criticism for its timidity. “It is a sad day for the First Amendment,” said Jane Kirtley, the executive director of the Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press, “when journalists back off from a truthful story that the public needs to be told because of fears that they might be sued over the way they got the information.”94
But nothing in 1995 invited more media self-flagellation than coverage of the double-murder trial in Los Angeles of O. J. Simpson, the former professional football star and popular television pitchman. The trial was the year’s biggest, most entrancing, yet most revolting ongoing event. Simpson stood accused of fatally stabbing his estranged wife, Nicole, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, in June 1994 outside her townhouse in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. The trial’s opening statements were delivered in late January 1995, and the proceedings stretched until early October, when Simpson was found not guilty on both counts.
Coverage of the Simpson trial was unrelenting, often inescapable, and occasionally downright bizarre—as when television talk-show host Larry King paid a visit in January 1995 to the chambers of Lance Ito, the presiding judge. A reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer recalled King’s visit this way:
After receiving a private audience with the judge in chambers, King bounded into court like an overheated Labrador retriever, drooling over the famous lawyers and waving to the audience as if he were the grand marshal at a parade. . . . After yukking it up with the lawyers, he eagerly shook hands with the judge’s staff, the court reporters and everyone else in sight. Only when he approached Simpson did King learn that in Superior Court, even celebrity has limits. As King extended his hand with a hearty “Hey, O.J.!” two surly sheriff’s deputies stepped between them and firmly reminded the TV host that double-murder defendants aren’t allowed to press the flesh. King smiled and shrugged sheepishly. Simpson smiled and shrugged back. Then, seeing no one left to shake hands with, the famous man turned to leave. Unfortunately, he picked the wrong door, walking toward the holding cell where Simpson is held before court. Deputies turned him around, pointing to the exit, where King paused to wave again before departing. “So long, everybody,” he said.95
Howard Rosenberg, a media critic for the Los Angeles Times, was not exaggerating much when he wrote in the trial’s aftermath: “We in the media have met the circus, and we are it.”96
Nor was humor columnist Dave Barry entirely kidding when he addressed the Simpson case in his year-end column, observing that the news media “were thrilled to have this great big, plump, juicy Thanksgiving turkey of
a story, providing us with endless leftovers that we could whip up into new recipes to serve again and again, day after day, night after night. . . . Of course you, the public, snorked these tasty tabloid dishes right down and looked around for more. Not that you would admit this. No, you all spent most of 1995 whining to everybody within earshot how sick and tired you were of the O.J. coverage.”97
At times, the coverage seemed to scramble the hierarchy of American news media. On separate occasions in December 1994, for example, the New York Times quoted unsourced pretrial reports that appeared in the supermarket tabloid National Enquirer. The Times was taken to task for doing so.98 The tabloid press seemed most familiar and comfortable with the grim tawdriness of the Simpson saga, which was overlaid with wealth, celebrity, race, spousal abuse, courtroom posturing, and no small amount of bungling by police and prosecutors.
In the end, the case left little lasting influence on American jurisprudence. But it was, as James Willwerth of Time magazine put it, the “Godzilla of tabloid stories.”99 The National Enquirer assigned as many as twenty reporters to the story and sometimes offered up its most extravagant prose. For example, it said in describing the slaying of Nicole Simpson: “The night ended with the bubbly blonde beauty dead in a river of blood on her front doorstep—her throat slashed, her body bludgeoned, her face battered and bruised.”100 As the trial got under way, the Columbia Journalism Review observed that the biggest secret wasn’t Simpson’s guilt or innocence. The biggest secret was that “so many reporters were reading the National Enquirer religiously.”101
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