Newsweek takes a critical look at Oprah and her advocacy of nonsense. This has been needed for a long time and hopefully, is just the beginning.
At some point, it would seem, people will stop looking to Oprah for this kind of guidance. This will never happen. Oprah’s audience admires her as much for her failings as her successes. In real life, she has almost nothing in common with most of her viewers. She is an unapproachable billionaire with a private jet and homes around the country who hangs out with movie stars. She is not married and has no children. But television Oprah is a different person. She somehow manages to make herself believable as a down-to-earth everywoman. She is your girlfriend who struggles to control her weight and balance her work and personal life, just like you. When she recently related the story of how humiliated she felt when she arrived for a photo shoot to find that she couldn’t fit into the clothes she was supposed to wear, she knew she had every member of the audience in her hand. Oprah’s show is all about second and third and fourth chances to fix your life, and the promise that the next new thing to come along will be the one that finally works.
I’ve had a hard time feeling warm fuzzies for Oprah ever since I read an article by one of her staffers, who told about the annual torture of buying a Gift (must have been for Christmas) for Oprah. There was intense competition among the staff to find something unique and expensive and clever and expensive. The expectation was there that the gift HAD to be elaborate and expensive, and that staffers would find themselves chastised if Oprah felt they hadn’t spent enough time/money/creativity/money on it. Granted, Oprah’s gifts to them were generous and over the top…but she makes a lot more money than they do.
Her New-Agey-ness seems to negate, for me, many of the good things she does. I try not to paint her with a broad brush, but I wish she could have retained some of the simplicity of her life before fame.
And I will never, ever believe the story about her first name. It’s just not logical to me. Unless I never heard it right to begin with.
Oprah for me loses any credibility she might have from her overall work by imbuing herself and therefore her audience with massive amounts of body hatred, insecurity and self-shame based on weight. When Oprah and her media empire and her billions of dollars talks about how ruined she feels because she weighs 200 pounds she’s sending a despicable message to her viewers.
Her weight issues are the only thing that make me (and presumably millions of viewers in her audience) feel connected to her. I don’t watch her show, and I am appalled by the kind of New Age nonsense that she promotes (thanks for the link to the article, Cumberdale), but her experiences with weight so closely tally with mine that I feel a genuine compassion and comraderie with her, like we’re all in the same club. In the midst of all of the wealth and celebrity, and stories like the one told by kittenblue, her weight issues are the one thing that make her undeniably human. She may be rich and famous, but deep down she’s just another fat girl struggling to survive.
I have no trouble accepting that her name is a mispelling of Orpah. Orpah is unusual enough that less educated people who were used to hearing biblical names could easily get it wrong. In my head, I always call her Orpah.
I used to really admire Oprah, but she has lost me. I first realized what a phony she is when she did a segment with Isaac Mizrahi about the line he designs for Target. They took a camera crew to the store, and she said she’d never been to one before. I thought, how can she relate to the average American woman if she has never even gone into a Target to see what it’s all about? She does all those segments about the “stuff” we need to have, but she doesn’t understand the environment the rest of us live in!
Then the James Frey thing happened, and she defended him via phone on the Larry King Show when the story first broke, and then when she realized which way the wind was blowing, she did an about-face and eviscerated him on her own show a day or two later. Way to take a stand for your ethics, Oprah.
I agree that a lot of the stuff on Oprah’s show is total nonsense and she does a lot of harm by spreading quackery.
However, I think we may be overlooking the fact that maybe that is WHY she is so enormously popular.
The average housewife would prefer to listen to Jenny McCarthy’s heartfelt stupidity than listen to a dorky scientist or physician calmly explain the truth about autism having nothing to do with vaccinations.
There is a reason why many people read the Enquirer for fun instead of the encyclopedia - even if it is not as accurate, it’s more fun and compelling.
Oprah is a reflection of the misplaced priorities of society (we worship celebrities and trust their opinions even when they have no clue what they’re talking about), not the cause of those misplaced priorities.
I’ve mostly ignored Oprah for, well, forever. I had no idea she was so harmful. Yikes.
Interestingly (to me anyway), I know one of the physicians the article quoted to counter Oprah’s nonsense. My wife trained under her. I fixed her kids’ computers once. Huh.
New Age stuff tends to make people think that they’re all enlightened and intelligent, without having to work at it. So they can feel good about themselves without all that troublesome business of studying ideas and actually thinking things through.
No wonder it’s so appealing to a certain segment of the population.
I have to agree with you here…the weight thing is the best way I can identify with her. And I believe that her name was a misspelling of Orpah…I have no problem with THAT part! Here’s my problem with that story:
You decide to name your baby Orpah. You fill out all the forms, you take your baby home, and tell everyone her name is Orpah. You call her Orpah, you teach her how to say her name when she starts speaking, everyone calls her Orpah. Years later, you need her birth certificate for something…maybe when she’s 16 and getting her license. So you get a copy…and discover that the spelling on the document is Oprah. Do you then stop calling her by the name you’ve called her her entire life…the one you picked out because you love it so? How do you get everyone else to switch? Would you switch your name, if you discovered the birth certificate was misspelled?
If you named your baby Elsa because you were a great lover of the work of Elsa Lancaster, and you discovered many years later a typo that listed her name as Elisa…would you then change what you call your child to match…even though you’ve never met anyone named Elisa?
I feel like the story is missing a logical connection between the cause and effect.
Maybe so, but people are stupid. So when I hear stories of people doing stupid things with very little logic being applied in said story, I tend to mostly believe them anyways. Just thinking less of their intelligence afterwards.
I knew a chick in high school whose name was Emilye. Her parents had named her after a character in a film… who it later turned out was actually Emiline.
Except that the discovery may not have been “16 years later”
personally, we used our daughter’s birth cert when she was 7 days old, and I know many others that would have referenced their own kids’ birth certs at only 1 or 2 years of age.
And I would further imagine that 40 + years ago (however old the ditz is) it wasn’t so simple to get a typo fixed/
For what it’s worth, I have a friend who’s name is also mis-spelt on his birth cert, and he goes by / uses the mis-spelling. (not sure when it was discovered)
And don’t forget, ***“The Universe has plans for you.” ***and "We are close to God when we dream."
Then she turns to the audience and says, “You all know that, don’t you?” And of course they all do. :rolleyes:
She’s smart enough to know exactly what her viewers want, and she gives it to them. And I don’t believe that a woman with her unrelenting drive cannot control her weight. If she actually lost weight and kept it off, she would lose her audience. She knows that, and milks it for all it’s worth.
