Art & Creativity Quote by Dick Schaap

Schaap isn’t mourning a lost golden age so much as diagnosing a profession that traded craft for spectacle and called it progress. “Shrinking art” is a sharp phrase: it suggests journalism hasn’t just lost money or audience share, it’s lost ambition. The “art” part matters. Schaap is pointing to reporting as a discipline of selection, proportion, and moral clarity - the ability to tell the public what matters and why - and arguing that those muscles atrophied under the pressure to feed the 24/7 machine.

“Hype” is doing double duty here. It’s not only the tabloid gloss, but the structural addiction to escalation: bigger headlines, hotter takes, more panels, more urgency, less verification. That’s the subtext: journalism’s incentives were already warping, and the O.J. Simpson case didn’t create the problem so much as reveal it at national scale.

Calling it a “landmark” is the most damning move. Landmarks are what you navigate by; Schaap implies the industry began orienting itself around courtroom-as-entertainment, celebrity as public interest, and narrative as product. The Simpson story fused race, fame, violence, and Los Angeles politics into a combustible cultural event. Coverage turned into a months-long referendum conducted in real time, with cable news learning it could replace reporting with theater and still win.

Schaap, a sports journalist who understood showmanship, is warning that when journalism borrows entertainment’s logic, it doesn’t become more accessible; it becomes more hollow. The public gets a front-row seat, but fewer facts worth remembering.