Oprah!

Ebony, July, 1995 by Laura B. Randolph

Oprah Winfrey is disgusted. "To a great extent, what I see on my competitors' [shows] is base," she is saying from her office inside HARPO Studios, the sprawling $20 million building she owns in Chicago where, five days a week, she puts on a show - the country's top-rated talk show, on the air live in Chicago, in taped syndication just about everywhere else.

It is from her throne as the reigning Queen of Daytime TV, from that mountaintop, that she can talk about talk, judge the genre she helped engrain in our consciousness, critique the competition. "They are designed to appeal to the lowest sense of ourselves," she observes, "the bottom of whatever people experience. There is no honor, no integrity in it."

These days, Oprah is holding back none of her contempt for what she says many of the talk shows have become: "crap." And she has reserved special scorn for what she describes as "the humiliation, the purposeful degradation of Black people in particular" on daytime TV.

"I saw a show where there was an entire row of Black men and the caption beneath their names was `Men Who Know They Are Dogs' and there was not a White face among them," she says. `When I see producers bring on Black people in such a way that they fulfill every negative stereotype we have ever seen or he I am embarrassed for us."

She is also genuinely puzzled and, though she doesn't come right out and say so, clearly more than a little hurt. "When I first started," says Oprah, "everything I did was criticized and talked about, particularly by Black people. People would say, `Oh, she's hugging the White people too much,' or `She goes to the White people in the audience more' or `She doesn't have enough Black guests on the show.' So now, when I see these shows where Black people are brought on to be purposefully degraded, I wonder where is the outcry now?"

A fair question, to be sure. But what about the far tougher one, the question that is infinitely more difficult to answer: Doesn't she feel responsible for creating the confrontational, exploitive television that so appalls her? Oprah narrows her eyes. She leans forward and lets her next words linger in the air.

"No, I absolutely . do not," she answers evenly "What I feel is that, just as Donahue created the path for me, I have created the path for a lot of other people. The reason why there are so many talk shows today is because people were specifically coming after the Oprah deal and looking for the bucks. But how each host has chosen to use their voice is not my responsibility."

No, it isn't. But, having devoted her fair share of shows to skinheads and adulterers, doesn't she think she at least contributed to the creation of an atmosphere in which such shows not only exist but flourish? Long pause.

"From the beginning, my philosophy has been that people deserve to come and to leave [my show] with their dignity," she responds. "I never did what you see on the air today - nowhere close to it - because I never wanted people to be humiliated and embarrassed. And that is why I will not accept any kind of responsibility for the crap that we see on TV everyday."

Just what her responsibility is, however, recently became a critical question in Oprah's life. It is the reason why, after watching the competition during a recent vacation and being sickened by what she saw, she decided to take a second look at her own show and the message it was sending.

What she realized was that she wanted to set herself apart. That she needed to, really. For Oprah, it became it matter of duty, of honor, of the highest, most elemental form of responsibility: the one she felt to herself, her audience and most of all her God. The greatest responsibility I feel is to my creator and what I try to fulfill for myself is to honor the creation," she explains. "The fact that I was created a Black woman in this lifetime, everything in my life is built around honoring that. I feel a sense of reverence to that. I hold it sacred. And so I am always asking the question, `What do I owe in service having been created a Black woman?"

The answer she reached can be seen on her show. From now on, says Oprah, she will use it "to change people's lives for the better."

Only in that way, she believes, can she hold on to her enormous personal wealth (estimated at $250 million, she ranked No. 2 on the Forbes Magazine list of the Top 40 earners in the entertainment industry), her unprecedented power (she is the only Black woman in history to own her own TV and film studio) and continue her reign as the most powerful woman in entertainment (she has produced prime-time specials and TV movies and has plans in the works to bring a number of books by Black women to the silver screen).

But what if her audience dislikes her new direction? What if her ratings take a long, steep dive? Would she do an hour of shock and humiliation to re-attract viewers? "I would absolutely quit first," she declares.

There seems to be no danger of that. Though the press has made much of the recent small slip in her ratings, Oprah has always had her finger on the Zeitgeist. From the beginning, her show has captured the American television psyche like nothing the industry has seen before or since. The fact is, since her show went national in 1986, it has remained head and shoulders above the others. All of them.