CHAPTER 18
THE OPRAH MODEL
In 1982 the then well-known film reviewer and television personality Roger Ebert was a guest on a local morning television show in Baltimore, hosted by a young and unknown host named Oprah Winfrey. As he later recalled, she seemed talented but suffered from poor bookings. “The other guests on the show included a vegetarian chef and four dwarfs dressed as chipmunks” who, as he recalled, sang the Chipmunks’ Christmas song while Hula-Hooping.1
Ebert, rather smitten, asked Winfrey on a date after she moved back to her hometown to host a program named AM Chicago. Airing weekdays at 9 a.m., the show faced tough competition in The Phil Donahue Show, airing at the same time. Phil Donahue was serious—for a talk show host at least—and popular. But Winfrey would rely on the age-old tactic of stealing attention by being more outrageous. She booked a group of nudists (who, naturally, did the show in the nude) and the Ku Klux Klan (who appeared in full regalia). On one episode exploring the question “Does sexual size matter?,” Oprah memorably pronounced, “If you had your choice, you’d like to have a big one if you could. Bring a big one home to Mama!” Scandalous it may have been, but hers was soon the leading talk show in Chicago.2
On their date Ebert took Winfrey to a place called Hamburger Hamlet and gave her some unsolicited advice. Having begun to do so himself, he suggested she leave the networks and take charge of her media destiny. Winfrey wouldn’t continue to date Ebert but she did take his advice, achieving a degree of independence that defied nearly all the existing strictures of the attention industries. She decided to take ownership of her show and sell it directly to television stations, becoming, in effect, a competitor to NBC, CBS, and other networks. She was the beneficiary of a federal rule enacted in 1972—part of a progressive backlash against broadcasters that President Richard Nixon found agreeable—designed to weaken their control over television.3 The bet was that her proven capacity to attract attention was sufficient to sell advertisers on her, and in turn, to sell her show to others.
The bet would pay off. Debuting in 1986, her show relied on an emotional, confessional style that was now what viewers wanted, combined with the lure of her own irresistible persona. She tacked toward respectability, shrewdly toning down the most lurid and shocking elements of AM Chicago, and thereby gained an even larger audience, rather as CBS made radio respectable in the 1930s, and as People had gentrified gossip journalism. Spectacle was now couched in principle, too. As one critic observed, she “cast her professional choices, persona, and style as moral ones” and “practiced a form of public ‘moral accountability’ with her audience.”4 Like People, too, she recognized that everyone loved to unburden herself, given the right conditions. Yet her winning wager was obvious only to her. As Time wrote in 1988,
Few would have bet on Oprah Winfrey’s swift rise to host of the most popular talk show on TV. In a field dominated by white males, she is a black female of ample bulk….What she lacks in journalistic toughness, however, she makes up for in plainspoken curiosity, robust humor and, above all, empathy. Guests with sad stories to tell are apt to rouse a tear in Oprah’s eye….They, in turn, often find themselves revealing things they would not imagine telling anyone, much less a national TV audience. It is the talk show as a group therapy session.5
Even now the scale of Winfrey’s ambitions was clear. She told Spy magazine, “I knew I’d be a millionaire by the time I turned 32.”6 The Spy reporter could not believe his luck: “She told me this in the first hour I spent with her. By the second hour she had added, puffing up with purpose, ‘I certainly intend to be the richest black woman in America. I intend to be a mogul.’ ” Her evident ambition invited some fairly sharp jabs in the early days. A New York Times Magazine cover piece entitled “The Importance of Being Oprah” took a dim view of her program, suggesting it was popular because it made white viewers feel better about themselves. It further derided her viewers as, in effect, losers, those “lonely and uninstructed” who “draw sustenance from her, from the flickering presence in their living rooms they call a friend.”7
It didn’t prevent Winfrey from winning wild adulation—particularly in her core demographic, white and black women over the age of fifty. What made her audiences love her so? She is a clear and fluent interlocutor with a talent for connecting with her guests, but it goes beyond that. Fans say they “trust her,” find her “sincere” and “open,” and respect her overcoming a challenging childhood (she freely revealed a past scarred by episodes of drug use and other behavior). “Oprah is a sweetheart, a good person, who treats people with love and respect, despite her wealth and power,” wrote one fan.
Winfrey’s success as a one-woman celebrity-attention merchant was distinct enough to draw imitators over the late 1980s and 1990s, who usually relied on a distinctive personality to draw audiences (usually niche) to their independent businesses. In 1987, a former ABC host named Geraldo Rivera launched his competitor to Winfrey’s show that tacked downmarket with the kind of topics that the early Winfrey had used to take attention from Donahue (example: “Men in Lace Panties and the Women Who Love Them”). He successfully garnered national attention during his second season after a brawl erupted on his show between a volatile mix of white supremacists, antiracist skinheads, black activists, and Jewish activists. Rivera joined the melee himself, throwing punches and suffering a broken nose, which he displayed prominently for weeks afterward.8
Howard Stern, originally a radio personality, began his own television show in the 1990s and gained a national audience with a show centered on offensive and taboo topics. With radio, television, and bestselling books as platforms, he described himself as “The King of All Media.” Meanwhile, the tabloid format (described by some as “freak shows”) was popular enough to sustain not just Rivera but also a former politician named Jerry Springer, whose show centered on topics like incest and whose specialty was creating dramatic on-show confrontations between his guests. Others, like the Ricki Lake show, the Jenny Jones show, and Sally Jessy Raphael, all, in the words of one critic, relied on “the low risk strategy of class voyeurism.”9
But even with new, more lurid competition, Winfrey’s show retained its audience, and academics and journalists have churned out untold pages explaining just what makes Winfrey’s audiences feel such a connection to her. Laurie Haag puts it down to her communication style, which she calls “girl talk,” and includes careful, supportive listening, accompanied by truly spontaneous reactions to what she’s told: “hooting, howling, laughing, or crying as the situation dictates, allowing the viewer at home to do the same.” Others credit her “courageous” candor about her own life. “It is her fearless ability to self-disclose,” writes Linda Kay, “that most distinguishes Winfrey from her peers.”10
But apart from all her undeniable talents and abilities and charms, Winfrey also offered something unique in daytime television: food for the hungers traditionally fed by organized religion and spirituality. Her shows were a daily dose of redemptive confession or suffering, a vision of justice, and the promise of salvation in this life.
The promotion of the Oprah Winfrey show didn’t shy away from describing its spiritual objectives: it was created “to transform people’s lives, to make viewers see themselves differently, and to bring happiness and a sense of fulfillment into every home.”11 At times Winfrey described her work as a religious mission: “I am the instrument of God. I am his messenger. My show is my ministry.”12
If we take Winfrey at her word and consider her work a ministry, it would have been one virtually unrivaled in size and influence in the late twentieth century. Oprah’s teachings, as a rule, hewed to a generally Christian view of existence, emphasizing love for the distressed, human weakness, life as a struggle, the value of confessing sin, and an ongoing effort to achieve redemption. She also emphasized ideas with twentieth-century origins, like the importance of self-esteem and self-respect, of positive thinking, and of treating oneself well. “Live your best life” was one of the show’s mottos.
But in one major respect Winfrey’s teaching tended to differ considerably from both Christianity and other traditional religions, which steadfastly warn of the spiritual dangers of materialism.* The show’s prescriptions for personal growth always included consumption as a means of self-actualization and self-reward. “For her, transformation is about self-esteem and about buying stuff,” says Susan Mackey-Kallis.13 Viewers were encouraged to treat themselves well with their purchases (“show yourself love”). And by the program’s very design, commerce was always unashamedly at the center, not only because Winfrey was running a business but also because spiritual growth and consumption were theologically linked, not in tension. Oprah’s great innovation was to amalgamate the ancient attention-capturing potential of a great faith with the programming function of a broadcaster, and the mass drawing power of her own celebrity. It was by the standards of any attention merchant a potent proffer for advertisers.
Advertising was indeed Winfrey’s main revenue source, and when she sold her audiences she was delivering not mere eyeballs but minds whose buying decisions had been conditioned by her unusually strong influence, which eventually “exceed[ed] that of any other celebrity—perhaps in history,” according to Craig Garthwaite of Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.14 It did not happen overnight, however. As one biographer writes, Winfrey was an enthusiastic shopper, and “for years she had shared her spending orgies with her viewers—her towels, her pajamas, her cashmere sweaters, her diamond earrings.”15 As time went on, her enthusiasm would morph into quasi-endorsements of particular products, her magical touch performing little miracles for small companies. To take one minor example, there was the firm named LightWedge, maker of a reading light; when Oprah said on air, “I need to get one of those,” the little company booked $90,000 in sales in a single afternoon.16
This, the “Oprah effect,” would always have its most dramatic influence in markets with relatively little advertising and marketing, like book publishing. In 1996, Winfrey launched what she called “the biggest book club in the world.” She would announce her selection and then give her viewers a month to read it. In the meanwhile, her producers would film the author at home and produce other B-roll footage for the eventual show about the book, featuring discussion, sometimes with an expert. Her first choice was The Deep End of the Ocean, by Jacquelyn Mitchard. Far from a dud, it had previously sold 68,000 copies; after its selection, however, it would sell four million. Within its first year, her book club had accounted for nearly 12 million volumes sold, making Oprah beloved of the publishing industry for her magic ability to turn modestly successful novels into bestsellers.17
Given such power, a less sophisticated attention merchant might have simply sought to sell endorsements outright (as subsequent corporatized personalities like the 2010s reality TV star Kim Kardashian have done). But whether out of ethical considerations, or an astute sense of preserving her credibility capital, or both, Winfrey never accepted payment for on-air endorsements. By never selling out explicitly as another flogger of products, she remained unpredictable, her power only growing as a result.
Scattershot at first, by the late 1990s her endorsements had become systematized in several ways. First, she produced a program called “Oprah’s Favorite Things”; for this annual event, the entire show was devoted to promotion of the products she liked most, some of which were given out to the excited studio audience. Combining the ecstasy of a religious revival meeting with the acquisitive intensity of Black Friday, the episode featured screaming, often crying men and women from the audience receiving their swag. As on a 1950s game show, ordinary people were suddenly showered with prizes. It typically started with pairs of boots, books, popcorn, digital cameras, and the like, before leading up to big-ticket items. Oprah, like a beneficent goddess of abundance, presided over it all, blessing her flock with one deliverance of riches after another. Her biographer Kitty Kelley describes the climax: “Nearly spent with orgasmic delight over what they had already received, her studio audience trembled as the drums rolled and the velvet curtains opened to reveal an LG refrigerator with a high-definition TV built into the door, a DVD hookup, and a radio…‘it [retails for] $3,789,’ Oprah screamed.”18
Winfrey also began to turn parts of her episodes into de facto infomercials. For example, on one episode, Winfrey abruptly gave her audience 276 brand-new Pontiac G6s, worth $28,000 each. When asked about it in a rare moment of press access, she said, “It was not a stunt, and I resent the word stunt.”19 Just as astonished as the audience were the pundits of advertising and marketing. Thirty-second spots on the show retailed for about $70,000, yet Oprah had spent about half an entire show on Pontiac, including a taped visit to their factory.
In 2000, Oprah widened her brand and attention harvest with the launch of O, The Oprah Magazine, named for her, of course, and with a flattering photo of her on the cover of every issue. The magazine, which surged to a circulation of over two million, had roughly the same demographic target as the show, women over fifty. Here was more attentional real estate, carefully balancing free endorsements with paid advertisements. It showed what an elixir first-order celebrity had become; clearly it had the power to reanimate even fading media sectors like consumer magazines.
It never fully escaped notice that Winfrey’s advertisers were those whose products often, if not invariably, enjoyed her on-air or in-print blessing as well. Over the mid-2000s, for example, Dove soap was the subject of major segments featuring its various products and their merits. True, the ostensible topic was the brand’s new advertising campaign, which promoted “real beauty” by featuring ordinary women as models. The messaging was a good fit with Winfrey’s goal of encouraging self-esteem. It’s also true, however, that Dove spent $16.4 million for commercial spots on the syndicated TV show and another $32.8 million on print ads in O. The company had even been kind enough to award one of Oprah’s friends and O, The Oprah Magazine’s editor at large, Gayle King, their very first Dove Real Beauty award.
A reporter for Advertising Age who asked whether ad buys were helpful for gaining endorsements, described Oprah’s answers as “a tad vague.”20 Indeed they were: “Editorial and creative decisions drive mentions and product inclusions on the show. If a brand gets mentioned, it is as often serendipity as it is business. When we do partner with brands, it is usually because we have an editorial direction we’re pursuing.”21 In other words, advertising usually didn’t matter, but it didn’t not matter either.
By the 2000s, Oprah Winfrey was one of the richest women in the United States, and the first African American billionaire in American history. Though hugely successful, she was not interested in being a dispassionate attention merchant in the manner of a William Paley. Rather, she remained convinced of the possibility of doing well by doing good, according to her vision. She would bring attention to many under-attended issues, like the abuse of children or dearth of opportunities for women or blacks. These were worthy pursuits by any measure. The difficulty arose when she pursued more controversial aspects of her vision of the good.
As mentioned, Winfrey’s self-described ministry had been intended as a source of uplift and moral guidance. It had been clear from the beginning that she was offering an alternative to organized religion, but to the extent that her values seemed in sync with Christian ones, there was little objection either by churchmen or Christians in her audience. American Christian devotion is fairly polymorphous by the standards of most Western societies; even Joel Osteen, the TV evangelist who preaches the Gospel of Wealth (“God wants you to be rich!”), seems to pass. But when Winfrey began espousing heterodox or explicitly un-scriptural teachings, one could see the beginning of a backlash.
In the early 2000s, Winfrey became an advocate in a spiritual doctrine called “the Law of Attraction,” an idea actually dating from nineteenth-century mind cure practice and with roots in other traditions. The law posits that one’s thoughts have the power to shape reality, and by the right sort of rumination, one can draw desired things, like money or love, into one’s life. Here is how Oprah explained it on her website: “The energy you put into the world—both good and bad—is exactly what comes back to you. This means you create the circumstances of your life with the choices you make every day.”22 In 2006, Winfrey repeatedly featured a book called The Secret, together with its author and associated gurus, on her show. The book describes the law and its applications, for instance, in financial matters: “The only reason any person does not have enough money,” it explains, “is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts.”23 It may be hard to see how this is any less Christian than Joel Osteen’s preaching, but the critics did not see it that way.
Winfrey’s endorsement of The Secret and other spiritual practices drew criticism from the religious mainstream. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote that “Oprah has become a high priestess and icon of the psychologization of American society….Her substitution of spirituality for biblical Christianity, her promotion of forgiveness without atonement, and her references to a god ‘without labels’ puts her at the epicenter of a seismic cultural earthquake.”24 Perhaps not an earthquake: Oprah was not so far from the therapeutic deism that had long been the American religion. But her attentional reach made her a substantial danger to traditional faith—even perhaps to the nonreligious as well. From the rationalist side, Michael Shermer found it necessary to write in Scientific American, “Oprah, please, withdraw your support of this risible twaddle [The Secret]…and tell your vast following that prosperity comes from a good dollop of hard work and creative thinking, the way you did it.”25
Perhaps Winfrey’s most consequential endorsement would be the one she made during the Democratic primaries in 2007, when she backed first-term senator Barack Obama against the presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton. Campaigning with Obama in Iowa, New Hampshire, and other important states, Winfrey may have been responsible, according to one analysis, for between 420,000 and 1.6 million votes.26 If so, it is possible that Winfrey’s support won Obama the nomination, and consequently, the presidency.
There were those who had objected to Winfrey’s political activities on a smaller scale. “Oprah is far more than a cultural force,” argued political commentator Ben Shapiro. “She’s a dangerous political force as well, a woman with unpredictable and mercurial attitudes toward the major issues of the day.”27 Now, however, there was pushback from within the ranks of her viewers, some of whom had backed Hillary Clinton and took to the show’s message boards to complain.28
In 2009, with ratings in decline, Winfrey announced that her show would end after its twenty-fifth season, in 2011. In the first of the last episodes, she abruptly flew three hundred audience members to Australia on a plane piloted by John Travolta. The last season brought back some of her largest audiences, and might have been thought of as a fitting retirement; but in fact the ever-ambitious Winfrey was simultaneously launching her own cable network, OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network.
But even Winfrey was not immune to larger industry trends, and launching into an era of cable’s decline would not prove easy. Many could either not find the network amidst the hundreds of channels on offering, or did not care to bother; in its first year, the network lost as much as $330 million. Winfrey used various means to try to recapture the lightning she once held in a bottle—most successfully, an interview of Lance Armstrong, the cyclist, who confessed to using performance-enhancing drugs. But these were one-off events and the audiences did not stay. She also made a go of her old show’s religious aspiration with an ecumenical series named Belief, a program that would have qualified as public interest programming by the old metrics. While never quite losing her celebrity or strong reputation, she could no longer quite be considered the nation’s Attention Merchant-in-Chief.
By 2015, OWN had reverted to the basic logic of cable programming, which has always demanded catering to a niche audience. It repositioned itself primarily as a competitor to BET, Black Entertainment Television, finding success with soap operas like The Haves and Have Nots and If Loving You Is Wrong.29 But in any event, Winfrey’s own fade as a celebrity attention merchant might be taken as irrelevant given the spiritual survival of the model she created. For her one-woman show gave rise to successors like Ellen DeGeneres, Dr. Phil, Rachael Ray, and other celebrity-attention-product-endorsers faithfully following the Winfrey path.