| Author | Message | ||
     Mrs_hart "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Mrs_hart Post Number: 121 Registered: 01-2006 Rating: N/A |
Until recently, Oprah Winfrey's biggest sin was to unleash Dr. Phil's loud mouth quackery on an already troubled nation. Dr. Phil is part of the Oprah empire, which consists of celebrity news and advice on how we ought to be "our best selves." Oprah should be given credit for accomplishing what generations of English teachers could not. Her book club has turned thousands of nonreaders into readers. One of her recent choices was "A Million Little Pieces," a "memoir" of drug addiction written by James Frey. As a result of the Oprah effect, Frey's book sat securely atop the bestseller lists. As often happens, success brought more scrutiny than was desired or anticipated. The Court TV web site, the Smoking Gun, investigated Frey's background and exposed him as a fraud and a liar. Frey was a suburban kid who liked to get high. He had no exciting stories to tell, but he wanted to write a book. He decided to make his life seem more dramatic than it really was. At first he was honest and marketed his book as a novel. When no one expressed interest he did what addicts always do. He concluded that lying was the surest way out of his predicament. His novel turned into a memoir. In his "memoir" Frey claimed to be in jail for three months when in fact he only served one day. He claimed to have caused a traffic fatality when he didn't. He claims numerous arrests for which no mug shots exist. Someone should have known that something wasn't right when he claimed to have had root canal without anesthesia. When the news of Frey's lies spread, the media sat in silent anticipation of Oprah's reaction. What would the powerful Queen of All Media have to say about promoting a huckster? James Frey took his case to the court of public opinion via Larry King Live. He even brought his mother along for support and sympathy. Frey believes the word memoir is a term of art and that it doesn't really matter if some events in his book were complete fabrications. At the very moment that Frey was getting an extra 15 minutes of fame with Larry King, Oprah called into the show to protect her investment. She gave Frey a pass. The woman who exhorts her viewer/followers to be their best selves did a 180 degree turn and declared that mediocrity and untruthfulness aren't such a big deal after all. "If you're an addict whose life has been moved by this story and you feel that what James went through was able to - to help you hold on a little bit longer, and you connected to that, that is real. That is real. And it's - it's irrelevant discussing, you know, what - what happened or did not happen to the police." Telling the truth is the most relevant thing for addicts. In recovery step number 10 addicts and alcoholics pledge that they have "Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it." When we don't admit to being wrong we take ourselves a little too seriously. Oprah failed that test during her phone call with Larry King: "And I feel about 'A Million Little Pieces' that although some of the facts have been questioned - and people have a right to question, because we live in a country that lets you do that, that the underlying message of redemption in James Frey's memoir still resonates with me." Oprah sounds a little like President Bush when he gets questions he doesn't like. In pointing out that we have the right to question, they give the impression that they would be happier if we didn't. Perhaps Bush inspired Frey. An untreated addict is president, why not an Oprah certified author too. Americans need to know more about addictions, about the societal and genetic risk factors, about the terrible toll addictions take on individuals and how they are cynically used to maintain the prison industrial complex. If Oprah wanted to help addicts "hold on" she should find authors who have truly recovered and help them sell their books. Those authors are a harder sell and need not apply. Oprah has succeeded because she gives celebrity worshipping, middle brow, middle America just what it wants. They want positive thinking and touchy feely advice, neither of which is very useful when discussing a serious issue. Oprah is all about the money, which doesn't make her different from any other corporate CEO. She has succeeded because she knows what people will buy. An overwrought, melodramatic addiction story that is well promoted will be a best seller. Frey helped her book club, he got a movie deal, she vouched for him, she doesn't look so bad and keeps her ratings high. All is right with corporate America. "Be your best self" is just a product and Oprah is the sales person. She is a smart woman who knows what her customers want. What she does should be regarded as nothing more than entertainment. Entertainment is a legitimate business, but it is just that, a business. There is no other way to explain Dr. Phil. | ||
| Mrs_hart "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Mrs_hart Post Number: 122 Registered: 01-2006 Rating: N/A |
"Oprah called into the show to protect her investment. She gave Frey a pass. The woman who exhorts her viewer/followers to be their best selves did a 180 degree turn and declared that mediocrity and untruthfulness aren't such a big deal after all. | ||
| Chrishayden "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Chrishayden Post Number: 1762 Registered: 03-2004 Rating: N/A |
Them cows ain't reading those books. They are buying them and walking around with them so they can act intelligent. Actually Phil, to me, was not Oprah's first sin. That was that atrocity she pulled down in Forsythe, Georgia. Again, though, I ain't mad at her. If you want to be rich you have to do just like she is doing-- | ||
| Zuriburi Regular Poster Username: Zuriburi Post Number: 36 Registered: 11-2005 Rating: N/A |
Chirshayden, What atrosity are you talking about? | ||
| Chrishayden "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Chrishayden Post Number: 1765 Registered: 03-2004 Rating: N/A |
I think it was the early 90's--there was--probably still is--this county in Georgia called Forsythe County. No black people lived there. Some activists were down there marching because they also gave any blacks who were going through a hard time, wouldn't hire any etc. I know some people here who went down for the march. Anyway Oprah does this show. She only allows the white people from the county in the audience. No blacks. You see all these hillbillies on there saying "We don't want no niggers here" and "Hosea Williams is a Nigger" and such. The crowning point was this white lady got up and said to the crowd--"Y'all been in here saying nigger this and nigger this--oh! I'm sorry Oprah, you ain't no nigger!" By the end Oprah looked like she had watched somebody kill her mama. By the way, you can also imagine my helpless rage at watching an hour of this. And, to top it all off, she promised that she would come back to the county and do a show where she let the black people have their say. They are still waiting. | ||
| Serenasailor "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Serenasailor Post Number: 113 Registered: 01-2006 Rating: N/A |
My dad said that now Forsythe county is just about all black. He just recently moved back to Atalnta a couple of years ago. | ||
| Abm "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Abm Post Number: 3997 Registered: 04-2004 Rating: N/A |
Chris, That's A LOT. I seem to remember parts of what you're referring to. And it was about as HILARIOUS as you describe. "The crowning point was this white lady got up and said to the crowd--"Y'all been in here saying nigger this and nigger this--oh! I'm sorry Oprah, you ain't no nigger!"....By the end Oprah looked like she had watched somebody kill her mama." BAAAWWWHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! | ||
| Abm "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Abm Post Number: 3998 Registered: 04-2004 Rating: N/A |
Chris, I remember Oprah had on her show these hillbilly a$$ White supremists. Mayne. Dem mofo's where talking A LOT shyt. One of them was flatout calling Black foks monkeys. Well Oprah jumps bad and asks the SOB whether he thought that SHE was a monkey. He ignored her. She asked again. He ignored her. Then finally she insists he answer her question. He said, quote, "I don't know WHAT the hell you are!". That was another of those "Oprah looked like she had watched somebody kill her mama." moments you previously described. BAAAWWWHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! | ||
| Abm "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Abm Post Number: 3999 Registered: 04-2004 Rating: N/A |
Btw: In my "Monday, January 23, 2006 - 05:33 pm:" post I meant to say "Thanks A LOT.", not "That's A LOT." | ||
| Yvettep "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Yvettep Post Number: 825 Registered: 01-2005 Rating: N/A |
LMAO, Chris and ABM! I'm fascinated by Oprah. She's going to make for wonderful fodder for decades of acdemic scholarship. I can't wait. | ||
| Cynique "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Cynique Post Number: 3530 Registered: 01-2004 Rating: N/A |
What's up with Oprah's hair? One day she looks like Mary Tyler Moore, and the next day she looks like her brain has exploded. meoooow. | ||
| Chrishayden "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Chrishayden Post Number: 1766 Registered: 03-2004 Rating: N/A |
She gave a platform for all these racists to stand up and show how aggrieved they were by the big bad black folks--a SEGREGATED forum where the only black was her. I repeat however, if Oprah was running the Oprah machine to suit me she would starve to death. She or her advisors knows America--it is fat, horny, ignorant, racist and strung out. She is a monument to the place that America has arrived at now--at one time we internalized and worshipped lies that were told about real people--now we internalize lies told about fake people. She is the big fake--giving advice on parenting when she has never been a parent, advice on marriage when she has never been married, hiding behind the image of the abused poor black woman when she is a billionaire--as bad as her life was supposed to be imagine the life of a mentally challeneged black woman incest victim with children and HIV positive. ON THE POSITIVE SIDE-- It is a bit of an advance when a black person can be as phoney baloney as a white one and prosper. | ||
| Mrs_hart "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Mrs_hart Post Number: 125 Registered: 01-2006 Rating: N/A |
Personally, I enjoy Oprah's magazine more than than her show. Even though her Black face is on the cover of EVERY magazine, if I didn't know better, I'd swear that the magazine is for and by White women. It's SOME of the articles I enjoy. I stopped watching her show in the early 90's. The bland people she has on (Brad Pitt's ex--WHO CARES?), explaining how to keep your clothing and cabinets nicely arranged---and just her and her OBVIOUSLY bored FALSE billionairess self. She has achieved fame and fortune beyond her wildest dreams---and now can sit back and "arm chair" psycho analyize the hell out of the rest of us. She was way more interesting when she was JUST a middle-classed working girl. Now, she is just like every celebrity that has become filthy rich: disconnected and boring. | ||
| Renata "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Renata Post Number: 499 Registered: 08-2005 Rating: N/A |
I agree with both of the last 2 posters, especially Chris. I don't watch the show, but my mother does...Does she really give advice on parenting and marriage? LOL | ||
| Abm "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Abm Post Number: 4005 Registered: 04-2004 Rating: N/A |
'Vette, There will be entire Master and Doctoral degrees dedicated to Opralogy. | ||
| Mrs_hart "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Mrs_hart Post Number: 130 Registered: 01-2006 Rating: N/A |
Spare me. I didn't purchase a book put out by Ebony Magazine because it had Oprah in it. The book was about Black America's greatest men and women. Most of the men and women in the book actually suffered and died to make us who we are today. I simply was insulted that they even added Oprah to the equation. I understand that she is a billionaire and has helped folk. But she AIN'T no MLK, Soujourner Truth, OR Madame C.J. Walker! | ||
| Abm "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Abm Post Number: 4006 Registered: 04-2004 Rating: N/A |
Mrs_hart, You don't think Oprah's discovering Dr. Phil ranks right up there with Harriet Tubman helping to free slaves? | ||
| Mrs_hart "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Mrs_hart Post Number: 133 Registered: 01-2006 Rating: N/A |
You make me laugh! | ||
| Yvettep "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Yvettep Post Number: 827 Registered: 01-2005 Rating: N/A |
Opralogy ...Still L-ingMAO!... | ||
| Yvettep "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Yvettep Post Number: 828 Registered: 01-2005 Rating: |
...Hey, not so fast w/the laughing: (1) A sociology PhD from syracuse: This dissertation is a study of emotional suffering in popular culture. The work examines emotional suffering not as an objective state of mind, but as a late 20th century social convention with a particular rhetoric. This study's focus on emotional suffering in popular culture contributes to the social and historical analysis of therapeutic practices. In this study I look at the television shows Party of Five, Once and Again and The Oprah Winfrey Show. The dissertation also involves an analysis of popular self-help books on emotional suffering. The final component of this work includes media interviews of public figures who have spoken publicly about experiences they frame as emotional suffering. This qualitative study examines the pervasiveness of therapeutic practices in North American culture and identifies the dominant ways in which top-selling self-help books, television shows and celebrities articulate, capture and reproduce common cultural notions of emotional suffering. The dissertation argues that the common practices that regulate the public articulation of emotional suffering define the self as the central subject and defining focus in society, substantiated as a crisis to be resolved through work. (2) Love this dissertation title: "Cowboys and celebrity: Reading rhetorics at the Texas Beef v. Oprah Winfrey trial" from a PhD at Washington State (3) And if you can decifer what this dissertation (from U Cal San Diego) is about, let me know! LOL This dissertation examines the co-constitutive and intertextual relationship between apparently separate sites of visual production to examine the pieces of imaged objects that make the popular and institutional witnessing of maternal bodies, and the experience of motherhood always, already racialized. Taking different cultural sites as points of departure--including photojournalism, film, and the visual media components of a teen pregnancy prevention initiative--each of the chapters analyzes the role of the visual in eliciting public sentimentality and affect around U.S. nationa(ist) configurations of "proper maternity." The first chapter contextualizes the posthumous circulation of images of Diana Spencer within a cultural history of racialized sentimentality that has its roots in the late 19th century. By first illuminating the racialized ideological material through which "The Queen of Our Hearts" (Diana) is resurrected as an ideal mother in U.S. popular journalism, this discussion sets the stage to investigate this material as it is intertextually, dialogically produced with other visual forms. Chapter 2 focuses on the 1998 film "Beloved" and considers whether or not the film's attempts to convey alternative experiences and meanings of the maternal are successful, given the racialized discursive terrains within which the construction and reception of its visual narrative occurs. This chapter also considers how the media persona of Oprah Winfrey, and her publicly granted titles of "America's psychiatrist" and "The Conscience of Our Times" impact the sentimental racial codes through which the film's productions of history, memory, and motherhood are read. The third and final chapter incorporates the readings and formulations developed in the rest of the dissertation to illumine the relationship between popular visual and state institutional productions of maternity. This chapter focuses on a California Department of Health Services public health education initiative that, between 1996 and 2000, drew on citizens' concerns about changing racial demographics, immigration, and non-traditional family structures to racialize the visual rhetoric of the "teenage pregnancy" problem. The dissertation as a whole demonstrates the co-constitutive role of seemingly disparate visual configurations of maternity to institutional (re)productions of national culture and identity. ...And so, Opra-ology begins... | ||
| Cynique "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Cynique Post Number: 3543 Registered: 01-2004 Rating: N/A |
Yes, Oprah is going to find her place into the American lexicon ala the communist-obsessed Senator Joe McCarthy, who during the 1950s inspired the term "McCarthyism" which in the political arena is now associated with smear tatics. "Oprahism" will one day come to mean the practice of assuming a materalistic demeanor while utilizing pat formulas to treat real or imagined social and psychological dysfunctions. | ||
| Schakspir "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Schakspir Post Number: 154 Registered: 12-2005 Rating: N/A |
"This dissertation examines the co-constitutive and intertextual relationship between apparently separate sites of visual production to examine the pieces of imaged objects that make the popular and institutional witnessing of maternal bodies, and the experience of motherhood always, already racialized. Taking different cultural sites as points of departure--including photojournalism, film, and the visual media components of a teen pregnancy prevention initiative--each of the chapters analyzes the role of the visual in eliciting public sentimentality and affect around U.S. nationa(ist) configurations of "proper maternity." The first chapter contextualizes the posthumous circulation of images of Diana Spencer within a cultural history of racialized sentimentality that has its roots in the late 19th century. By first illuminating the racialized ideological material through which "The Queen of Our Hearts" (Diana) is resurrected as an ideal mother in U.S. popular journalism, this discussion sets the stage to investigate this material as it is intertextually, dialogically produced with other visual forms. Chapter 2 focuses on the 1998 film "Beloved" and considers whether or not the film's attempts to convey alternative experiences and meanings of the maternal are successful, given the racialized discursive terrains within which the construction and reception of its visual narrative occurs. This chapter also considers how the media persona of Oprah Winfrey, and her publicly granted titles of "America's psychiatrist" and "The Conscience of Our Times" impact the sentimental racial codes through which the film's productions of history, memory, and motherhood are read. The third and final chapter incorporates the readings and formulations developed in the rest of the dissertation to illumine the relationship between popular visual and state institutional productions of maternity. This chapter focuses on a California Department of Health Services public health education initiative that, between 1996 and 2000, drew on citizens' concerns about changing racial demographics, immigration, and non-traditional family structures to racialize the visual rhetoric of the "teenage pregnancy" problem. The dissertation as a whole demonstrates the co-constitutive role of seemingly disparate visual configurations of maternity to institutional (re)productions of national culture and identity." Baudrillard/deconstructionist bullshit. It's just big words put together, people. | ||
| Edenson Veteran Poster Username: Edenson Post Number: 74 Registered: 06-2004 Rating: N/A |
Hart... What's the difference between madame c.j. walker and oprah? All she did was make it easier to manage black hair. she was the first self made female millionare... the same with oprah except she has surpassed miss walker and went into the billions... | ||
| Mrs_hart "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Mrs_hart Post Number: 163 Registered: 01-2006 Rating: |
If you don't know the difference between Oprah and Madame C.J. Walker, than you haven't done your homework. It's up to YOU to know the difference between a media creation and an early Black icon such as Walker. You're on the Net. Do your homework | ||
| Abm "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Abm Post Number: 4019 Registered: 04-2004 Rating: N/A |
'Vette & Mrs_hart, Just trying to help lighten the tone around here. Some of you foks need to have a Coke and a smile, already. Seriously, though, I think Oprah has, on balance, provided some social and cultural benefit. But, like with many other things, the credit and adulation she receives outpace her contributions. And, as Chris alluded to before, I too think her credibility is hampered by the fact that she's has never married and/or birth & raised children. But then, perhaps, she wouldn't have become as successful as she's become. Perhaps life would have a tad too complex for a lot of her Opralogy to bear. | ||
| Mrs_hart "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Mrs_hart Post Number: 195 Registered: 01-2006 Rating: N/A |
Maybe her kids would have tied her up and slapped her upside the head. Maybe they would have run away and gotten drug addicted for spite. I can just see Oprah psychoanalyizing her poor son/daughter because they have spilled their CoCo Pebbles on the marble floor. By the way: Oprah has finally stopped idolizing herself and read the tea leaves: She has come out against Frey's lies. |
