[tofRobbroolve]

www.fancast.com (News & Gossip)


The end of an era is about to happen. The most powerful daytime TV talk show will end its run in '2011.

Long-time TV talk show host queen, Oprah Winfrey, says that her production co will announce sometime today, that she will end her show sometime in 2011.

She has hosted the long-running talk show since around mid '86. Reporters say that even if she decides to retire, that she'll still be able to live comfortably. She's worth an estimated $2.7b.

She's also said to be one of the most powerful woman in America. She campained with President Barack Obama when he ran for the White House. On her show, she gave away keys to new cars, and overseas, she help to form a program and home for poor disadvantaged children so that they can have a better life and a much brighter future. Some of her guests included Obama, powerful celebs and most recently, former Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin.

She DOES have her own production co which will NOT end, and she also plans to launch her own cable network sometime next year. Guess in two more years, she will not be getting with the program.

[kavaTeexy]

Oprah is the Howard Stern of the TV talk show world - always threatening to quit, and always changing her mind in the end or backing away from her promise. I'll believe it when I see it.

[IteseFrusty]

I wish it was really goodbye, and that her and Gail would ride off into the sunset, but we'll be stuck hearing about her constantly because of the new network she plans on starting.

[oraltyrap]

Take it that you two aren't Oprah fans.

[ElisasAUG]

I could care less one way or another.

But c'mon - how many times has she threatened to quit the daytime talkshow biz?

Thus the H. Stern comparison - he's another notorious would-be quitter.

[Cvo1iRT0]

Well, she has officially announced it near the end of the show. Just watched it. She had started to cry.

But we'll see what else happens.

Guess that there are SEVERAL notorious would-be quitters who've changed their minds. Look how many times Mike Jordan had quit playing professional basketball before he finally quit. So it happens in sports as well.

Michael Jackson was going to quit touring after the last one that he was about to do. In fact, he had stopped touring long before deciding to do the one that he was about to do. Bet that if he were still alive and did the tour, he would probably do another one.

Rod Stewart is another one. He came back and renewed his singing career after he had quit because of a condition with his throat.

[LoveTTatall]

*cough*Favre*cough*

[byncnombmub]

Oprah is interviewing Obama for a prime time Christmas special.

That should please the lunatic right wing.

[SetSnonejog]

...Or infuriate the lunatic left wing.

[VarenHokalos]

Depends what he says on Tuesday. And then what happens over the following weeks.

[naturaherbal]

the lunatic left wing. What lunatic left wing?
Where are they hiding? I never see them on my TV or read about them in my newspapers. They must be an elusive bunch.

[Jeffery]

Interesting viewpoint.



The Church of Oprah Winfrey and a Theology of Suffering

By MARK OPPENHEIMER

“The Oprah Winfrey Show” ended Wednesday, bringing despair to booksellers who relied on her book club, television programmers who needed her ratings, and religion scholars who for a decade have tried explaining how this child of poverty became the leader of a worldwide cult. They have worked just as hard to define that cult, which is at once Christian and pantheistic, African-American in origin but global in reach.

The scholars found conflicting sources of Ms. Winfrey’s spirituality. It began, but definitely does not end, with the black church of her youth. In her 2003 book, “Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery,” Eva Illouz, a sociologist, quotes Ms. Winfrey as saying: “Since I was three and a half, I’ve been coming up in the church speaking. I did all of the James Weldon Johnson sermons” — Mr. Johnson being the poet whose “God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse” was published in 1927. “I used to do them for churches all over the city of Nashville,” Ms. Winfrey said.

Dr. Illouz, who teaches at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, found that elements of the black church, like its emotionality and focus on justice, “pervade ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show,’ which has taken on the vocation of relieving a multiplicity of forms of suffering through the use of speech infused with the rhetorical style of black preachers.”

While respecting Ms. Winfrey’s use of her Christian heritage, Dr. Illouz ultimately concluded that the talk-show host might be something of a false prophet. That is because, she said, Ms. Winfrey and her cadre of self-help experts treated suffering as something beneficial. Ms. Winfrey turned the black church’s ethos of self-reliance in the face of suffering into an exaltation of suffering itself.

“By making all experiences of suffering into occasions to improve oneself,” Dr. Illouz wrote, “Oprah ends up — absurdly — making suffering into a desirable experience.”
And if, as Ms. Winfrey’s teachings suggest, strong women “can always transcend failure by the alchemy of their own will and of therapy, then people have only themselves to blame for their misery,” Dr. Illouz said.

Ms. Winfrey has religious antecedents besides the black church. Kathryn Lofton argues in her new book, “Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon,” that to understand Ms. Winfrey it helps to know Charles Grandison Finney, the great antebellum evangelist.

In his 1830 revival campaign in Rochester, Mr. Finney formalized the “anxious bench,” a pew or altar where sinners congregated while members of the crowd prayed for them to repent or become Christians. A whole plotline revolved around the bench, and worshipers eagerly anticipated its ritual. Who would sit there? Would they be saved? “At every point,” Dr. Lofton writes, “the preacher prodded, focused, named and decried.”

Dr. Lofton argues that in an atmosphere suffused with Ms. Winfrey’s beliefs in miracles, angels and pervasive spirituality, audience members got to see guests participate in “the familiar ritual turn of daily confession and rejuvenation.” Whether the day’s show featured the organization expert decluttering somebody’s home or “confessions of a once-upon-a-time Haitian child slave,” the redemptive plot arc, the payoff of deliverance, was the same.

And like the best hellfire preachers, Ms. Winfrey could be merciless in exacting those confessions. “Guests are forced to admit their worst transgressions,” Dr. Lofton writes, “to say precisely how they felt when they pulled the trigger, for example, or, in Governor McGreevey’s case” — that is James E. McGreevey of New Jersey, who resigned after cheating on his wife and coming out as gay — “to describe the sordid locations of his clandestine sexual encounters.”

(Dr. Lofton and I both teach at Yale but had never met until I interviewed her this month.)

Yet the Church of Winfrey is at most partly Christian. Her show featured a wide, if drearily similar, cast of New Age gurus. As Karlyn Crowley writes in her contribution to “Stories of Oprah: The Oprahfication of American Culture,” an essay collection published last year, Ms. Winfrey excelled at offering “spiritual alternatives to the mainstream religions” in which many of her followers grew up. Ms. Winfrey presided over something like a “New Age feminist congregation,” Dr. Crowley writes.

That is a rather neutral way to put it. Oprah scholars excel, as many good scholars do, at withholding judgment, seeking to explain rather than praise or condemn. One wishes for a more critical eye. I, for one, found something cathartic in Dr. Illouz’s brief critique, when she called Ms. Winfrey “absurd” for “making suffering into a desirable experience.”

In her earnest spiritual seeking, Ms. Winfrey gave platforms to some rather questionable types. She hosted the self-help author Louise Hay, who once said Holocaust victims may have been paying for sins in a previous life. She championed the “medical intuitive” Caroline Myss, who claims emotional distress causes cancer. She helped launch Rhonda Byrne, creator of the DVD and book “The Secret,” who teaches that just thinking about wealth can make you rich. She invited the “psychic medium” John Edward to help mourners in her audience talk to their dead relatives.

“The Oprah Winfrey Show” made viewers feel that they constantly had to “sculpt their best lives,” Dr. Lofton writes. Yet in her religious exuberance Ms. Winfrey gave people some badly broken tools. Ms. Winfrey nodded along to the psychics and healers and intuitives. She rarely asked tough questions, and because she believed, millions of others did, too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/28/us...iefs.html?_r=1

[prpaims]

There was an old Star Trek episode where aliens called people "Bags of Mostly Water". That's what I think of every time she climbs up on the pulpit...a big, bloviating, bag of mostly water.