Oprah Winfrey's New TV Channel Fails to Win Viewers
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Oprah Winfrey's new television channel is floundering in the ratings as it struggles to pull in viewers.

The OWN channel, which launched two months ago, is being watched by only 135,000 people at any one time.

The ratings are 10 per cent lower than for the cable channel it replaced which was called Discovery Health.

And only 45,000 of those watching are women aged 25 to 54, the audience the channel is being aimed at.

Miss Winfrey, 57, has urged patience and supporters say ratings will improve when the chat show host begins appearing more regularly herself towards the end of the year. >>> Nick Allen, Los Angeles | Tuesday, March 01, 2011

Oprah Reveals Her Big Family Secret

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Oprah Winfrey reunited with 'secret half-sister': Oprah Winfrey, the US chat show queen, has been reunited with a secret half-sister she never knew existed. >>> Nick Allen, Los Angeles | Monday, January 24, 2011

Oprah Addresses Lesbian Rumors
Talk show host gets emotional in interview with Barbara Walters

Oz Taxpayers Footing the Bill for Oprah's 'Gift'
YAHOO! TV UK: Taxpayers in Australia are reportedly furious after discovering they will be paying to fly Oprah Winfrey's audience to the country.

The Daily Mail claims that the Australian tourist board is splashing out more than $2.3 million to take 300 of the chat show host's guests on an all-expenses-paid trip. >>> Paul Johnston | Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Related >>>

Oprah Winfrey’s Surprise Gift

Oprah Comes to Australia @ Yahoo! Video

YAHOO! TV UK: Oprah Winfrey's suprise gift: American chat show star Oprah Winfrey surprised her 300-strong audience yesterday by offering to sending them all on an eight-day trip to Australia. >>> | Tuesday, September 14, 2010

'I Am Oprah's Father,' Claims Farmer
THE TELEGRAPH: A poor Mississippi farmer has claimed to be Oprah Winfrey's biological father.

Noah Robinson, 84, a Second World war veteran, claimed a DNA test would show he was the talk show host's real father and said he had written to her year ago asking for one.

His claims, reported by the New York Post, could not be verified and Winfrey has not commented on them.

Mr Robinson told the newspaper: "I'm her real father. I haven't seen her since she was a kid. She was a little bitty thing." >>> Nick Allen in Los Angeles | Monday, April 19, 2010

The power of Oprah
THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY: Virtually no television network has shown interest in Kitty Kelley's new biography of the chat-show host

She has built her fame and considerable fortune by baring her soul to a nation of telly addicts on an almost daily basis. But despite her carefully cultivated "woman of the people" image, Oprah Winfrey takes an exceedingly dim view of any outsiders impertinent enough to wonder what really makes her tick.

That, at least, is the verdict of the celebrity biographer Kitty Kelley, one of the book industry's foremost scandalmongers, who claims the magisterial chat-show host's personal privacy is protected by a brand of media censorship so far reaching that it might have turned Senator McCarthy green with envy.

Ms Kelley, who has previously taken a typewriter-shaped hatchet to the lives of such luminaries as Nancy Reagan, Frank Sinatra, and the British Royal Family, will tomorrow publish an unauthorised biography of Winfrey, which is expected to delve into her abusive childhood and somewhat mysterious sex life.

The eagerly awaited tome will have a print run of 500,000, and sufficient buzz already to be in the top 25 of Amazon's sales charts. Yet in contrast to almost every other biography of Ms Kelley's career (many of which have been number one bestsellers) the launch of Oprah has attracted virtually no interest from major TV channels.

Every US network – with the exception of NBC, which will have her on Monday's Today show – is reported to have decided, after some consideration, not to feature the author in its programmes. The management of ABC allegedly slapped a formal ban on her appearing on its airwaves.

In an interview this week, Kelley blamed the blackballing on a collective paranoia across the industry about upsetting Winfrey, who remains one of the most powerful individuals in broadcasting and exerts a mysterious hold over prominent talk show hosts who have refused to have anything to do with the new book.

"We have already been told by Barbara Walters' producer 'no, you cannot be on The View. I cannot disrupt my relationship with Oprah'," Kelley revealed to The New York Times last week. "Joy Behar, the same thing. Charlie Rose; Larry King said 'I will not do it, it might upset Oprah'. Even David Letterman." >>> Guy Adams | Sunday, April 11, 2010

Oprah Calls It a Day
TIMES ONLINE: Oprah Winfrey, the Queen of the American talk show, is to give up her sofa after 25 years of A-List interviews, weepy personal confessions, and spectacular audience give-aways—in spite of a contract that saw her earn an estimated $275 million (£166 million) last year alone.

The 55-year-old African American star, who was born into poverty in rural Mississippi—the daughter of a teenage single mother—is thought to have decided to call an end to her hugely successful show because of her much-anticipated plans to launch a cable channel.

“The sun will set on the ‘Oprah’ show as its 25th season draws to a close on September 9, 2011,” wrote Tim Bennett, the president of Ms Winfrey’s company, Harpo Products, in a letter to employees. They were reportedly informed of the decision late on Thursday.

In spite of its 4pm air-time and relatively modest viewership of 7 million, The Oprah Winfrey show is a force like no other in modern broadcasting.

Vastly influential with American women, its unashamed sentimentality and focus on inspirational first-person stories and self-improvement advice has influenced American pop culture profoundly, in particular the presentation of news.

Indeed, the ‘Oprahfication’ of news is such that when Ms Winfrey announced to her studio audience last year that she had gained weight—to the point where she had reached 200lbs—the revelation briefly turned into a more prominent story on the cable news channels than the collapse of the global economy. >>> Chris Ayres in Los Angeles | Friday, November 20, 2009

Bringing An End To This False Prophet Obama! Jon Voight

Hat tip: RonboSoldier >>>

The Church of Oprah

The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback – USA)
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Hardcover – USA)

Oprah Loses the Midas Touch. Has Oprah’s Dalliance with Politcs Cost Her Dear?
Photo of Oprah Winfrey courtesy of Google Images
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)

Women Turn on ‘Traitor’ Oprah
THE SUNDAY TIMES: AMERICA’S favourite television presenter is paying a painful price for her intervention in the US presidential campaign last month. Oprah Winfrey has been dubbed a “traitor” by some of her female fans for supporting Barack Obama instead of Hillary Clinton.

Winfrey’s website, Oprah.com, has been flooded with a barrage of abuse since the queen of daytime chat shows joined Obama on a tour of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina in mid-December.

Her intervention was widely credited with broadening Obama’s national appeal - especially among women - and with helping him to an upset victory over Clinton in the first vote of the election year in Iowa.

Yet a backlash by Clinton supporters appears to have prompted a rethink by Winfrey, the African-American media titan who is routinely described as the most influential woman on television.

She did not reappear in the final days before the New Hampshire primary - which Obama lost to Clinton - and has been absent from the most recent campaigning in South Carolina, which votes next weekend. Women turn on ‘traitor’ Oprah Winfrey for backing Barack Obama: Oprah fans leave a barrage of negative messages on her official website in response to the talk show host's support of Obama >>> By Tony Allen-Mills, New York

Mark Alexander (Paperback)
Mark Alexander (Hardback)

Islam According to Oprah
Photo of Oprah Winfrey courtesy of Google Images
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE: Is Oprah Winfrey a threat to national security? No, but now that the war has begun, I worry about her, and here's why.

The nation cannot afford the naive illusions that have given many Americans comfort in peacetime. Chief among them is the notion, repeated ad nauseam by our leaders and the media, that Islam is a religion of peace. This may not be an outright lie, but it is so far from the full truth as to approach falsehood.

Americans have been told that they shouldn't attack the Muslims among us, and only the lowest of the low would disagree.

The American people, with very few exceptions, have risen to the challenge to be humane, decent, and loving toward Muslims in this country. Well and good.

Americans by nature want to think the best of those from other cultures. But we run the risk of blinding ourselves to the nature of the threat facing our country and our civilization. In his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Harvard's Samuel P. Huntington warned us of deluding ourselves about the true nature of the Islamic threat.

"Some Westerners, including President Bill Clinton, have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists," Huntington wrote. "Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise."

We can sit around making diversity quilts and thinking happy thoughts, or we can, with charity, commit ourselves to soberly assessing the historical and present-day reality of "peaceful" Islam, and its relations with non-Muslims.

Which brings us to Oprah. Last Friday [this article appeared on October 8, 2001], she devoted her program to "Islam 101," purportedly a crash course in the Mohammedan faith for her vast television audience of clueless Americans. It was grossly imbalanced and extremely dishonest. In fact, given how many Christians and other non-Muslims are horrifically persecuted today by Muslims in the name of Islam, it amounted to offensive propaganda.

Oprah called Islam "the most misunderstood of the three major religions" — yet did her best to add to the confusion by candy-coating the complicated truth about the Muslim faith. If you were to take Oprah's show as your guide to Islam, you would think Muslims were basically Episcopalians in veils and turbans.

Take her interview with Queen Rania of Jordan, a lovely, modern young woman who looks more at home in the pages of Vogue than in a hijab. The queen said that Islam "doesn't impose anything" on people — an absurd lie. Oprah asked her about the so-called "honor killings" of women in Jordan, murders committed by men against women in their families who are believed to have shamed the clan. For example, some young women who have been raped are in turn murdered by their male relatives for having stained the family's honor. Islam according to Oprah: Is Oprah a threat to national security? >>> By Rod Dreher, columnist for the New York Post

Mark Alexander (Paperback)
Mark Alexander (Hardback)