IMO, she has overstayed her welcome and has now become a hack. There was a time when she actually did do some good–she talked about serious domestic issues: spousal abuse, alcoholism etc.
I haven’t watched her in years (except brief moments at work–pts tend to watch her), but I did catch part of one show she did on cervical cancer. I lost complete respect for her for the guest she had one: some female gynecologist who did NOT recommend Pap smears OR the vaccine for cervical CA.
But you did say that you put down a book just because you saw that it was one of Oprah’s books of the month. What does that have to do with Oprah being an intellectual lightweight (which I pretty much agree with)? She herself may not be too bright but a lot of the books she’s chosen are very good. If I wanted to read something, I wouldn’t let the fact that she also liked it or endorses it control what I do.
As I’m wont to say in matters like this: Not doing something because everyone else is doing it is the same as doing something because everyone else is doing it. You’re still letting “the herd” make your choices for you.
I used to watch Oprah sometimes back in the 80’s, when she was doing more of a standard daytime relationship porn/freak show. I don’t think I ever particularly liked her, and especially not when she’d bring psychics or new age bozos on and give them credibility, but something that really turned me off of her permanently was when she started embracing that “Course in Miracles” drivel and endorsed a piece of crap book called “Return to Love” by some lounge singer cum low level religious scam artist and self-appointed guru named Marianne Williamson. That sent sales of her shitty book through the roof, imbued Williamson with utterly undeserved fame and credibility, and really started the whole Oprah book endorsing thing.
Another thing that made me despise Oprah was when she made a big show of walking out of a pre-show screening of the movie, Interview with a Vampire, and had a big, grandstanding prayer circle with her entourage because, she thought the movie represented “forces of darkness.” She was screening the movie because Tom Cruise was to be her guest that day, promoting the movie. He still stayed for the show and listened to her, and members of her asskissing audience spend an hour berating him about “forces of darkness, and forces of light.” It was such a load of self-aggrandizing, sanctimonious, philosphically childish bullshit that I pretty much wrote her off forever. I can’t stand her. think she’s the epitome of grandiose, celebrity narcissism. Even her much publicized charity and gift-giving stunts are done to elicit praise and hero worship.
They may have covered the doctor in question in the Newsweek article. Does this lady look familiar?
(By the way: thanks to the OP. We’ve hashed out a lot of the stuff in that link here, but it’s really good reading. The Sommers stuff, in particular, was mind-bending. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to inject myself with seven flavors of steroids.)
Totally agree with Jodi on this one, I find this aspect of The Secret particularly repugnant - avoid sick people, they have attracted sickness, if you are interact with them, you can attract their sickness. I can’t even imagine this sort of thinking - if your kid has cancer, avoid your kid! It is the cruelest, heinous…well, I could go and on how awful I find this thinking.
She’s pretty hypocritical since the Secret says the same thing about fat people. True believers in The Secret would avoid Oprah since she is attracting fat.
From Newsweek:
The second thing to know is that the condition of being overweight was created through your thought to it. To put it in the most basic terms, if someone is overweight, it came from thinking “fat thoughts,” whether that person was aware of it or not. A person cannot think “thin thoughts” and be fat. It completely defies the law of attraction.
Make it your intention to look for, admire, and inwardly praise people with your idea of perfect-weight bodies. Seek them out and as you admire them and feel the feelings of that-you are summoning it to you. If you see people who are overweight, do not observe them, but immediately switch your mind to the picture of you in your perfect body and feel it.
I bought Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections just because he refused to let Oprah put her stupid sticker on it. It’s a pretty good novel too.
The only book I have with Oprah’s tag defacing the cover is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I couldn’t find a copy in the store without the stupid sticker.
Theres a joke about missing dark matter in there somewhere…
I recall an interview with Downtown Julie Brown many, many years ago in which she related meeting Oprah at a celebrity event. DJB was smitten with all that Oprah-goodness and asked to have her picture taken with her. Oprah was dismissive and rude.
Lets face it, she’s a smart business woman. She has a product to sell and she markets is wisely. She’ll leave her gig with her minions wanting more.
No, not so much. I just don’t want what I do to have the Oprah stamp on it. That’s all.
On my birthday I buy a cake and my staff eat it. I’m in the wrong business.
Re the OP, what do you think the level of crossover is between people who take Oprah seriously and people who read Newsweek? Do they make numbers that small?
I had a boss who did “dirty birthdays”: when it was your birthday, you brought the goodies, or there were none, your choice. Seems rude at first, but it’s BRILLIANT. It worked perfectly: you weren’t being pestered for $2 all the time and you didn’t have to remember other people’s b’days and worry about somebody getting left out (which somebody always does) and if you were broke or chose not to honor your b’day you didn’t have to. It’s the way I’d do birthdays if I were a manager of a large place.
I’ve also expressly told student workers and employees I’ve supervised to not get me anything for my birthday or Christmas. As I tell them, I know how much you earn and how expensive Christmas is and I don’t need anything, plus the truly wonderful thing about this is that even if you weren’t planning on getting me anything anyway you can say you were but I ruined it.
Weird- I had completely forgotten this, but when you mentioned it I remembered, because this was actually what got me into Anne Rice. I had no intention of seeing the movie but when Oprah was talking about how evil it was and how she walked out of it I thought “sounds like a new Omen, gotta see it”. (Specifically I remember it was the scene when Lestat tempts Louis with the neck of a slave played by Thandie Newton that she said made her leave the theater, though she said the scene where Louis drains a rat had already literally nauseated her.) The real irony is that one of Anne Rice’s 42 main faults is that she discusses the nature of good and evil endlessly and uses vampires as metaphors as blunt objects.
At the same point she finds Tyler Perry incredible, or said she did. IIRC he was already pretty popular when he was on her show. (I wonder where she stands on Dan Brown, who rivals Perry for my “proof of the existence of a soul buying Satanic entity who pays better than Cash for Gold ever could or ever would” talentless pandering hack prize.) Of course Perry and Winfrey have a lot in common in that both got rich telling people who want absolutely no nuance or complexity what’s good and what’s not.
I’ve never watched her show regularly, I’ve just caught an occasional episode. The time that I remember really saying “Oh do get over your damned self” was when the guest was Deepak Chopra (who I don’t think I’ve ever read a nice anecdote about; my understanding is that he is all ‘maharishi meets dalai lama meets Maria von Trapp’ on camera but turns into a prima donna prick who’ll throw hissy fits and objects if the wrong bottled water’s in his mini-bar with ‘regular people’). Oprah was telling him “Something you said that I read that finally, FINALLY made things make sense to me is when you said that it’s a mistake that our souls are inside us, but rather… we are inside our souls. That one sentence… it like rewrote what I knew and made it make sense…”.
I remember watching this and thinking “Oh Jesus Christ”. I’ve heard deeper things come out of the mouths of stoned chorus members at the closing night cast party of the college drama department, and- as she would do with THE SECRET, she acted as if it was all the best parts of Aristotle, Shakespeare, Leibniz, Kierkegaard, Twain, Gandhi, and Hawking united with all brilliance intact, all differences reconciled, and all condensed into a sentence. I honestly wondered what she was on.
Her patronage of Frey’s Million Easy Pieces I couldn’t have cared less about- I’ve yet to buy a book based on her rec but I’m actually glad she got some people reading something more than romance novels and Enquirers. I don’t fault her for not knowing how completely bogus his book was since it was released as non-fiction. What did irk me though was that when the scandal broke, she stood by him… for a couple of days. Then when the tide was clearly against her, she dumped him like a hot potato, but rather than tell him this she ambushed him in a return appearance on her show- I’ve no great swelling sympathy for Frey either, but this was such a blatantly CYA self-serving thing on her part. And, I understand since then (per Frey) she’s apologized to him again.
Well, I certainly don’t think she’s evil or any more narcissistic than many superstars, and she has done a lot of good for charity. I do agree with Kathy Griffin’s assessment though, which is “someone needs to tell her she’s not Jesus”. (I don’t think Kathy Griffin’s been on her show since then, but I could be wrong.)
And she has Billy Graham on her show, who is possibly the most famous “I’m all about Jesus” person in the world, after the Pope, and he prays, and she looks all reverent. Then she has on some cockamamie Secret person, who claims he’s controlling the universe with his mind, etc, ad infinauseum.
A student of mine and I now call her “the philosophical whore.”
Would that be the Larry King whom Paris Hilton told “I’ve never done drugs”? He let that one go, despite the fact that there were already pictures on the net of her toking out, at Coachella, I think it was.
Paris Hilton was on Larry King? That’s unspeakably weird.
King gets a break though. Larry King died in 1993 and since that time his embalmed corpse has sat a desk recycling 36 years of recorded sound bytes with guest. While “Is being the daughter of a rich hotel owner a challenge?” is easily made from the words on file, as are Paris and Hilton, there’s no Coachella for his handlers to draw from.
Now it all makes sense.
Larry’s been sitting at the desk for too long. His posture reminds me of a jumbo prawn at this point.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0706/27/lkl.01.html
KING: Have you ever been addicted to drugs?
HILTON: No.
KING: Taken drugs.
HILTON: No.
KING: Never taken drugs?
HILTON: No.
King then goes on to ask her why there are so many stories about her, and she says that people make up crazy stuff.
KING: Why didn’t you put a stop to this earlier? In other words, if you would read stuff, why didn’t you take an outlet to go on and say I don’t – I never use drugs? I don’t drink?
HILTON: I don’t – I just feel like when you do that you put more attention to something. And when something is not true I just don’t pay attention to it because I know my friends and family know the true me.
This from one of the biggest attention, um, whores in North America, routinely seen exiting clubs lit up, at least before her jailing. I don’t know about now. And King never brought up the fact that she’d actually been photographed smoking “hand rolled cigarettes.”
A friend of mine had a small interview tv program for NHK in Japan, and I worked with him on his interviews. In that capacity, I went along to the CNN building in L.A., and Larry may have actually said “hi” to me. The friend asked him about the perception that he’s a softball pitcher, and he said that he feels that you should let people tell their story, and that you just let them. Which means that if they tell you a flat lie, apparently you just let it sail by.
I see he’s uploaded these onto the net now. Wow. The Bully! Pulpit Show Classics: Larry King on Vimeo Go to 13:20.
And it saves you having to do any homework before the interview. So you don’t have a clue who this singer/governor/writer/doctor is, no problems; everybody has opinions on the weather or pop-culture or vague political matters, which is why the guest might be Osama bin Laden and the question will be “what do you think of Susan Boyle? Wasn’t that something?”, or if Linda Evans writes a book claiming her spirit guide told her that eating grapefruit and scrambled eggs will cure cancer, AIDS, osteoporosis, and enable you to live to be 300 he’ll ask “Why do you think the medical establishment is so loathe to admit that grapefruit and scrambled eggs work better than pharmaceuticals and surgery?” rather than ask for any evidence. He just wants to get his paycheck, go back to his 18th wife and the kids she told him were his, and see who’s on Ed Sullivan tonight.
Your right on here. He basically admits “Yeah, I just ask ‘what happened,’” while conveniently leaving out the more important “but wait, that’s not happened,” follow-up. Hell, who wouldn’t want to be on that show?
“I insist. Please tell us your crackpot theory. Also, I am wearing suspenders.”
Another thing he could have easily pressed her on: “Well, this all started off with the DUI, which was a .08. And I will never drink and drive again. Granted, it was, you know, one drink, but no one should do it.”
One drink, huh? Was it one of those boots you get at German restaurants? A cauldron of rum?
So basically the show is just a pulpit? Great. We need more of those. Man, Larry. If I had cable, I’d never watch you.