WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

This is the first video in a series I’ve wanted to do for a LONG TIME, but my digital ducks just weren’t in a row. It’s time for a lengthy look at the Tonya Harding / Nancy Kerrigan scandal of 1994.

My apologies we haven’t done this earlier, but it wasn’t possible yet. First I had to get to these tapes, then I had to digitize each one, then I had to catalog their contents. It’s taken a while, and ideally I wanted it done last February on the 25th anniversary of the scandal, but we’ll have to settle for the anniversary year instead of the month. Use the “Tonya Harding” tag to bundle all the clips.

This was a very unique time in the history of media. We were at the point where technology had evolved to allow hyper-focused and aggressive 24-7 news coverage of anything, but we WEREN’T at the point where this tech would shatter the news into a million fragmented and heavily biased pieces. There were still only a handful of options if you wanted to know something quickly, and they commanded a total monopoly on the audience. But to stay profitable, to keep the machine going, they needed content, and once they had it they had to wring as much as they could out of it.

So throughout much of the 90s, when anything happened, anything at ALL, it was a HUGE EXPLOSIVE DEAL and hundreds of news vans and helicopters would surround the subject matter without cease. Problem was, it was the 90s and the world was much better off than it is now. Truly scarring and horrifying news was hard to come by; they had to settle for making a scene out of whatever was available. I remember when Burt Reynolds got divorced and it was all you heard about for a month.

The stage was set, the media was starving, and the Olympics were in two months. Words can’t describe how utterly EERIE it is sifting through these tapes while knowing what’s ahead. This footage comes from January 7, 1994. Talk shows full of Mervyn’s ads and only the slightest mention of “oh yeah, some chick was bopped on the ice today.” This World News Tonight story is the earliest mention I can find.