Thursday , March 28 2024
In the world according to Oprah, Oprah is infallible and you forget that at your peril.

Oprah The Victim

So Oprah Winfrey feels duped by author James Frey, writer of the so called memoir, A Million Little Pieces. “But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers.” she added yesterday as she ripped her previously favoured author a new one.

Oprah’s surprising about face came only a week after she phoned in her support for the beleaguered author on “The Larry King Show”. Ever since the story was broken a couple of weeks ago that James Frey’s “memoir” of a life of crime and drug addiction was more fact than fiction, Oprah had stood by her man.

She was the one who catapulted him to fame in the first place. When she gave A Million Little Pieces her sticker of approval by making it a selection of the Oprah Book Club it was guaranteed massive best seller status. Frey himself was given the full Oprah treatment; cried over, praised and built up into some kind of one-man model of redemption. If he can come back from the edge of destruction, than anybody can.

So what caused Oprah to do such a full about face? The only thing that could make her change her mind: bad publicity for Oprah. All last week, she and her people had been receiving emails from disgruntled fans asking her how she could continue to support somebody who was such an obvious liar. Her fans, her ratings, and maybe her advertisers had spoken…James Frey had to be dropped like a hot potato.

He had committed the most unspeakable of crimes; he was making Oprah look bad. In fact, she was looking like an idiot for endorsing, supporting, and making a hero out of some guy who lived in a fantasy world of what a hard case he had been.

Last week, she was claiming that emotional truth mattered more than facts; this week. she was saying that she had left the impression that truth wasn’t important and blamed people who supported the book for clouding her judgment with all the emails they sent her. I wonder how many people who read and supportedA Million Little Pieces continued to do so only because she herself had initially endorsed it and continued to do so publicly until yesterday?

Poor Oprah, a victim of her own success at huckstering; she had convinced so many people of the veracity of this book that they wrote in to tell her how much they believed in it, and her. With all those endorsements based on her endorsement ringing in her ears, how could she tell the difference between right from wrong?

Just as her favourite author of the month James Frey had such a hard time distinguishing between the truth and lies, Oprah had a hard time distinguishing between what was going to damage her reputation more, supporting Frey or cutting him loose. Interestingly enough, in spite of yesterday, she did not rescind her A Million Little Pieces’ Oprah Book Club selection. Maybe it’s just too much hard work to go around taking all those stickers off the books already in stores.

I notice that amidst all her finger-pointing at Mr. Frey’s publishers, and the fans of his book, she has conveniently forgotten to mention anything of her involvement in the matter. She didn’t even apologise for saying that lying didn’t matter; all she did was make one of the lamest excuses I’ve heard since the days of Nixon and Watergate.

Has anybody heard her say to the reading public “I’m sorry for continuing to endorse this book after it was found to be full of lies”? You’d think it would be front-page news if she did and I haven’t seen any record of it yet. If I’m wrong, I apologise in advance to Ms. Winfrey for missing it, but as far as I can see she’s playing the role of the victim to the hilt, and acting like she had nothing to do with promoting both the author and the book.

Does this woman have no shame? She freely admitted on her show that her people had received information that the book might have contained inaccuracies but, instead of checking it out independently, they phoned the publisher. Let me see; you’ve just published a book as a memoir and Oprah phones to ask you if it’s true because she wants to endorse it, what do you do? Tell her the truth and say you don’t know and kiss millions of sales goodbye, or say yes of course it’s the truth?

If that’s the way Oprah’s fact checkers work on every story, you have to wonder about the accuracy of anything you see on that show. Publishers may not have the resources and the wherewithall to fact check all of the supposed memoirs that come into their offices that they want to publish, but Oprah can’t make that excuse.

She’s one of the wealthiest women in America; her show is massively syndicated and has access to resources beyond the scope of most news shows. Yet her people didn’t bother to fact check a couple of arrest records, or any of the other information that was refuted by The Smoking Gun

Even when she had the opportunity to follow up on their leads, which might have been the wise course considering that suspicions had been raised earlier, she refused. Instead of behaving responsibly and having her people check into things closely she kept on accepting everything Mr. Frey said at face value or, even worse, saying it didn’t matter whether he had told the complete truth or not.

But I guess if she were to accept any responsibility for this mess it would take away from her position as a victim in this matter. Poor Oprah, everybody has been out to get her this year. First, it was those horrible people at the Hermes store in Paris who wouldn’t let her come in after they had closed for a staff party. Now it’s James Frey, who had the nerve to be the liar everybody said he was and make her look bad for supporting him this last couple of weeks.

I wonder what Mr. Frey was expecting when he accepted the invitation to appear on Oprah’s show yesterday, an opportunity to defend himself again? Maybe some soft questions from Oprah that would lead to some tearful self-recriminations about lying and addiction that would soften the hearts of his critics?

Unfortunately for him, he had committed the unpardonable crime of making Oprah look bad so he had to pay the price, public humiliation in the form of being booed by the same studio audience who had so recently showered him with adoration. In the world according to Oprah, Oprah is infallible and you forget that at your peril.

About Richard Marcus

Richard Marcus is the author of three books commissioned by Ulysses Press, "What Will Happen In Eragon IV?" (2009) and "The Unofficial Heroes Of Olympus Companion" and "Introduction to Greek Mythology For Kids". Aside from Blogcritics he contributes to Qantara.de and his work has appeared in the German edition of Rolling Stone Magazine and has been translated into numerous languages in multiple publications.

Check Also

GalaxyCon Richmond: Tara Strong

"Perfect is boring and you're going to make mistakes. If you learn from them, let them go."