NEW YORK — Hip-hop superstar. Successful businessman. Hamptons homeowner. Role model. Style setter. Clothing designer. Performing artist.

Those were some of the ways potential jurors in Sean "Puffy" Combs weapons and bribery trial described the music mogul Thursday, the second day of jury selection.

The panelists were led into Judge Charles Solomon's court one at a time to disclose what news reports about the case and its key players they've read or watched and whether they can be impartial in light of what one defense attorney termed "the hype."

"It was all over the television," a middle-aged white man admitted.

"It" was a December 1999 shooting at a Times Square nightclub. Combs, the CEO of Bad Boy Entertainment, and his girlfriend, actress-singer Jennifer Lopez, were at the club with a bodyguard, Anthony Jones, and an up-and-coming rapper named Jamal "Shyne" Barrow.

According to prosecutors, a fracas broke out with Barrow and Combs drawing semiautomatic weapons. Barrow is accused of shooting three bystanders and faces attempted murder charges. Police say Combs fled the scene with Lopez and Jones in a chauffeur-driven SUV. He and Jones are accused of illegally possessing guns and of offering the chauffeur a bribe of money and a ring to take the rap. The last charge spawned such headlines in the city tabloids as "With This Ring I Thee Bribe."

"You'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to have heard anything" about the case, Barrow's attorney, Murray Richman mused earlier in the week. He wasn't far off. Only five of the 64 Manhattanites interviewed said they knew nothing about Combs or his arrest.

Combs' attorneys, Benjamin Brafman and Johnnie Cochran, pressed jurors on whether they could discard what they heard and saw in the press and "treat Mr. Combs like any other person."

Most said they could. About a third, however, said they could not be objective. Those given the boot included a white man whose employees told him Combs was "being railroaded" and a Hispanic woman who said her concern for Lopez would affect her decision making. A handful of panelists took issue with Cochran's role as a defense attorney in the O.J. Simpson trial.

"I thought he got a guilty man off," one white woman in her 20s told the judge. "It just makes me wonder why he was picked as a lawyer in this case." She was dismissed.

But the most common reason jurors were excluded was that they looked unfavorably on Combs and the circumstances of his arrest. A few said they were already convinced he committed the crimes, and others said they were turned off by the world of nightclubs, guns and rap music.

"It seems like a win-win situation [for the defendants] given the image, the lifestyle these men created, exploited, reveled in," said an older white male who was later dismissed.

Those who remained in the jury pool had mostly positive things to say about Combs. An older white man recalled friends who lived near Combs in the Hamptons describing him as a good, responsible neighbor. A black middle-aged man said his children look up to the rapper, and a white woman in her 30s called his hit song "(I'll Be) Missing You" — a tribute to his friend, the rapper Christopher "Notorious B.I.G." Wallace — "very touching."

About 90 more jurors remain to be questioned Friday and Monday.