I think she’s basically a good-hearted person who occasionally has some irritating ways and who really does try to use her power for good in this world. I’m able to watch her show every day, but never do. Mostly due to those “irritating ways.”
I’m indifferent to her show, but overall, I like the gal.
This is almost exactly, to the word, how I felt about Oprah until she started pimping antivax BS. If she would lay off the antivax nonsense or at least go so far as to have actual scientists on her show to provide the opposition majority viewpoint, I would go back to thinking she was a harmless entertainer who probably gets some people to read more than they would have otherwise.
She’s so far off my radar that I was pretty much unaware of the anti-vax thing. I wasn’t aware that she was doing more than just the occasional Jenny appearance. No idea she had an “O” campaign going. I still think it’s more of an ignorance thing than an evil thing, though. I think SHE thinks she’s doing good work.
I agree that not buying a product just because her name is on it, is inherently stupid. The product or book is either good or bad on its own; the fact that she likes it can’t possibly change that.
I don’t believe in “sky magic,” but as a practicing Christian I certainly do believe in God. Prayer – well, it has power, IMO, but the power to center and calm, as opposed to the power to heal, AFAICT.
And I loathe The Secret because it’s facile on its surface (“think your way to health and wealth!”) and insidious when taken to its logical conclusion, which is that if bad things happen to you – well, you must have “attracted” them. I have no problem with Norman Vincent Peale variety “power of positive thinking” but the woo-woo “law of universal attraction” bullshit is just that IMO: bullshit. And the key difference between that and garden-variety faith and prayer – other than 2000 years of history and a core that is (or at least should be) unselfish – is that The Secret can and has been disproven. Christians don’t believe or assert God will grant your every prayer if you pray hard enough. Christians don’t assert that if your prayer didn’t come true – well, that just shows you didn’t pray hard enough.
I can see Oprah’s accomplishments and her gifts – she’s obviously a smart and talented woman who has her finger on the pulse of the American zeitgeist. But I lost a great deal of respect for her for her credulous acceptance of The Secret. I also think she’s overly impressed with herself, which is a very human failing given the adulation she lives with on a daily basis – but self-congratulations is not an attractive quality even when understandable.
My example for this is her Legends Ball, which she threw to honor prominent African-American women. She directed that all the guests, including the 50 A-A women who were the supposed guests of honor, dress in black and white – and then she herself wore a flaming red dress. It’s a minor things, sure, but making yourself the center of attention at a party ostensibly thrown to honor other people – it just indicated a lack of self-awareness that I thought was sort of remarkable.
Not sure if that makes me a “hater” or not, which to me sounds like a person who runs an anti-Oprah website or pickets outside Harpo Studios. The fact is that I don’t really care enough about her one way or the other for my position to be characterized as “dislike”, much less “hate.” I think what I feel – to the extent I give it any thought, which I never had – is admiration for her professional and charitable accomplishments, coupled with a lack of admiration for her over-confidence, her self-admiration, her conviction that she knows what’s best for all of us, and the fact that due to her great power and wide public admiration, when she puts out misinformation or pimps the stupid, she does a lot more damage than a person without her forum and her reputation – whether she intends the harm or not.
If that makes me a hypocrite in your eyes, I’ll just have to bear up, keeping in mind that my opinions are not likely to line up anyway with those of someone who says “I just feel like, so what? I mean so what if she promotes people that have ideas that are outright lies. Big deal.”
**Nzinga **- may I just say I thoroughly enjoy your participation on the SDMB? I look forward to seeing you sitting on the sidelines on a Pit thread, popcorn in hand, laying down color commentary and the occasional prod required to convert a weak-ass rant into a very proper Pitting. As **Sleeps With Butterflies **would NOT have me say: you Go girl!
I am finding this thread fascinating - and finding the arguments offered by you and **Sleeps With Butterflies **to be apples to most other posters’ oranges. You seem to be basically stating “look, I find Oprah *entertaining *and consider myself enough of an adult to filter out the stuff I disagree with or don’t care about.” Whereas most other posters seem to be picking specific examples of topics that immediately. rule. out. Oprah.
So **Nzinga **and **Sleeps **are trying to point out to the OH’s that they (the Oprah Haters) are exhibiting the same behavior that many of them - at least those who are Obama supporters - pointed out and trashed in the Bush Administration. Bush had black and white views and imposed them on our national and international dialogues. Obama has been trying to remind us that we can accept and work within grayer areas - life is complex. Well, that can apply to trivial issues like whether Oprah is okay or not, too.
I never watch Oprah, respect her business success, find her involvement with and therefore seeming support of some issues silly, enjoy and respect some of her books choices but find others mind-numbingly stupid - but understand that it’s all about the business and her business is to entertain.
Jodi, I appreciate your post, very thoughtful and well said. I respect that. But with all due respect to the religious, one has to understand that to me, everyone that goes around preaching the ‘power of prayer’ sounds exactly like anyone else going around ‘peddling nonsense’. I’m used to it and don’t think its a big deal. No matter how many tmes folks quote that back to me; I’m a bit jaded on nonsense-peddling being par for the course in this society.
And everyone draws that line differently, I understand that. But whereas you would put the The Secret in the same category as mainstream religion (and find hypocritical support of one but not the other), I put it in the same category as ESP and psychics (allegedly supernatural nonsense that is disprovable, and disproven), and find hypocritical support of her in the face of that…
So I guess I still don’t really get where you’re coming from. If Oprah did a show extolling ESP, disclosing her reliance on psychics and her conviction that her life is better because of psychics and our would be better if we considered using a psychic too – would you think less of her for that?
I don’t understand how you can think that at least some of what she peddles is utter bullshit, and still love her so freakin’ much. Maybe IYO her successes and the distance she’s climbed outweigh the bad decisions she sometimes makes regarding what she supports. In light of her great influence, I have trouble giving her a pass on some of this stuff – and I don’t just mean The Secret, I also mean the anti-vax stuff, and the HRT stuff as well. Some of the information she is not just supplying but actually advocating is not merely wrong, it’s dangerous. And I do believe that the position she has created and embraced for herself – an advocate for all of us to live well and do well – means that she should meet a higher standard than, say, Ricki Lake or Jerry Springer, regarding what she puts out there. They don’t act like they have the secret (no pun intended) to personal betterment. She does.
Wordman, maybe I need to KEEP my ass on the sidelines! Ha! But, I hear you. Of course Oprah hustles some silly shit. And I genuinely don’t knock folks that dislike her for good reasons.
If you believe the arguments are apples and oranges, I presume it is because people are considering the issue very differently. Myself, for example. I don’t watch the show, I am not a member of Oprah’s community, and as such, for me there are simply no offsetting benefits to net against the harm I perceive she enables. Yes, I do believe people are helped by her philanthropy and yes, I believe the encourages some people to read who would never ordinarily pick up a book. These benefits are somewhat abstract and are definitely diffuse. I don’t know that an average person is actually better off reading The Secret than not reading at all, so for me this is somewhat neutral.
There are specific, obvious, and real harms that she enables. This is not a complex space. This is not a gray area. This is not a place where there really is much actual ambiguity. Ambiguity is injected into the discourse about vaccination because this is the only means by which the bankrupt, ascientific, and dishonest enemies of public health can undermine genuine knowledge. I confess that I am far more tolerant of unconventional life choices, strange religions, and alternative lifestyles than I am of the erosion of, well, reason.
Ok, let’s think about this another way: rock music. Your knowledge of this subject is vastly deeper than my own, so I would ask you to forgive my generalizations in an effort not to fight the hypothetical. Rock music’s purpose, more or less, is to entertain. Contemporaries were very uncomfortable with this art form because they believed, on some level, that it eroded traditional values and promoted a “drug culture”. A few people, under the influence of sex, drugs, and good tunes did some crazy things.
But at the end of the day, rock is just music. It is only truth insofar as truth is beauty. It may change how people view the world and can express themselves in it, but I do not think it seriously undermined (or was even perceived to undermine) human reason and empirical truth.
Unfortunately, for all of her entertainment value, it seems to me like Oprah is heading in this direction in her desire, for whatever reason, to give her audience what she thinks it wants. I have no judgment on the preferences of her audience, just on the outcomes of decisions made by the key actors here in this little scenario.
It’s ok to sell fantasies. I try to buy six of them every day before breakfast. But there are real repercussions to selling dangerous fantasies disguised as plausible and even scientific truth. This is where Oprah is teetering on the line that separates the harmless but entertaining huckster into something far worse. No matter how entertaining she might be, this I just cannot accept.
And therein lies the source of the problem.
Jodi, thank you for once again expressing exactly my thoughts in the thread’s most rational, clearly-worded and unimpeachable posts.
What problem is that?
Maeglin - really well articulated and I pretty much agree with your positions in the ridiculosity of The Secret, anti-vax luddite-ism, etc…
I guess my point is I think similar to **Nzinga’s **in her comment on my first post: Oprah means nothing to me as a role model, so I don’t hold her up to any “role model” standards. Period.
She runs a business and says what she thinks she needs to in order to grow the business. Anyone looking for solid, fact-based grounding in her stated beliefs - or some official Oprah-Housekeeping, Consumer Reports-vetted authority are missing Oprah’s sole purpose: to make money. Her getting folks, to one degree or another, to buy in that she is a Voice of Authority worthy of cult worship is just a maguffin - a tool to gain money and power, but completely fabricated. No different than Queen Elizabeth I “marketing” herself as The Virgin Queen (and therefore Married to England, so all English citizens should love her for her sacrifice and commitment) back in her day.
If she were truly in a position of authority - such as an elected official or the head of the American Medical Association - then, yeah, I would be shoulder-to-shoulder next to you in protest. But she is no different than Billy Mays or the Sham-Wow guy - just with a different look and peddling a different brand of snake-oil…so?
Oh, and Maeglin, I forgot to mention: yep, your analogy with rock music makes sense - I don’t look for it to shape my life values either. And yeah, Oprah can skirt dangerous territory - she claims to touch on important stuff that her audience should take to heart. But that is part of her *shpiel *- same with any entertainer of that ilk…
Guy speaking here…
I don’t love Oprah, but I like her well enough. I had the chance to go to a taping here in Chicago a couple of years ago and had a great time (I was one of only about fifteen men in the audience.) I certainly see her appeal.
The difference between Oprah and Vince Shlomi (who incidentally was arrested for beating a hooker) of Sham-Wow fame is that if you waste $20 on a crappy towel, you are only out $20. If you waste $20 on The Secret, maybe you’ve fileld your brain with a little distasteful and faddish crap, but again, no real harm unless you carry its principles to an absurd and harmful extreme.
If you do not vaccinate your kid, you are endangering the life of your child and that of other people around you, neither of whom have either the power to consent or to negate your action. Why should Oprah be given a pass just because she is a saleswoman and because this is her brand? Bill Maher certainly doesn’t get a pass for his anti-science crap, so why should Oprah?
Of course you’re right - but I don’t give Oprah a pass. No one should. The fact that some folks do - well, that’s certainly a choice they can make…
I don’t hate Oprah.
But I don’t believe it’s in any way hypocritical to point out that she’s generally full of shit, even if, once in a while, she happens to shill for a product I may actually be interested in*.
*This is a hypothetical. I don’t keep track of O’s endorsements. I am not interested in “The Secret” or “The Power of Prayer” or “Sky Magic,” whatever that may be. I think I once saw her talking about a coffee maker or something that looked pretty cool.
This is pretty much the reason why I don’t think this is a grey area. Thanks for your thoughtful remarks, though. I enjoy reading your posts about other things besides music. 
FWIW, I have a friend who works/worked? for Oprah, specifically regarding the school in South Africa. She had very little involvement with its operation, for better or for worse. I understand my friend was very frustrated with the lack of organization, etc. with the operation.
I have another friend who worked for O the magazine… she was a big fan of Ms. O.
I can concur with Nzinga’s point, which if I’m following the thread correctly, is that it’s not 100% the person’s fault if they attract idiots. So I can’t put fault at her door completely because some people think that Suzanne Sommers or Jenny McCarthy are fonts of knowledge. However, I think a good interviewer, or someone aspiring to help people think might bring contrary perspectives or opinions to the table. That would, in my opinion, be a much more honest and responsible way of using one’s influence or celebrity.
As I said in the other thread, there’s a lot to respect and admire about Oprah, but I’m mostly indifferent to the 2009 version, and probably veering toward the slightly negative. It would be wonderful for someone with her power to use it to encourage people to be careful consumers of information.
I think at this point, her audience plays to her, like those of extreme left/right wings talking heads.