THE INDEPENDENT: She is the embodiment of the American Dream, a Mississippi girl born into poverty who became the queen of US television. But now viewers are deserting her.
They call it the O-Factor: the power to make or break, to change lives, to sell millions of books, and to exercise a magnetic pull on the hearts, minds and wallets of middle America. For Oprah Winfrey, it is the intangible quality that brought her fame, made her fortune, and turned her into perhaps the most influential woman on the planet.
So it is with a slight sense of disbelief that some in the US have begun to wonder whether the magicO-Factor could be on the wane. How can a country that has embraced Oprah for so long, and turned her into a living embodiment of the American Dream, now explain a slow decline that has apparently begun to tarnish her glittering multimedia empire?
Look at the figures: this week, it emerged that average audiences for The Oprah Winfrey Show have fallen by nearly 7 per cent in 2008, its third straight year of decline. From a peak of nearly nine million in 2004, the afternoon chat show's viewing figures are hovering perilously close to the psychologically-crucial seven million mark.
Then there's the failure of Oprah's Big Give, a prime-time philanthropy show that was launched with huge fanfare before Christmas, only to mislay nearly a third of its audience during an eight-week run. A mooted second series, again on the mass-market channel ABC, has been abandoned.
Or what about the slow decline of O, the Oprah magazine? Its circulation has fallen more than 10 per cent in the past three years, to 2.4 million. At the Chicago headquarters of Harpo, Winfrey's global business (its name is Oprah, spelled backwards), they are now seeking a new editor-in-chief after the departure of the longstanding incumbent, Amy Gross.
Talk of terminal crisis may be premature but one thing's for sure: the universal adulation that turned Oprah into the most popular TV host in history is no more. At 54, her longstanding Midas touch is vanishing, fast. The End of the O-factor? Oprah Loses Her Crown >>> By Guy Adams
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback – USA)
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Hardcover – USA)
