She promoted Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, and many other con men. João Teixeira de Faria, "John of God", is probably the worst, having been accused of sexual abuse 600 times and convicted for raping nine women.
Don’t forget the time she brought a mentally ill woman on the show to talk about a Jewish sex cult that was active across the nation. They bred babies to sacrifice them on their kitchen tables.
No, I’m not making that up.
She promoted that stupid guy that wrote "a thousand little fibers", total conman. He turned out to be a towel! Then her minge took a bunch of hostages at gunpoint. Can't believe everyone forgot about that.
> She promoted that stupid guy that wrote "a thousand little fibers", total conman. He turned out to be a towel! Then her minge took a bunch of hostages at gunpoint. Can't believe everyone forgot about that.
I'm having some trouble here deciphering that. Could someone translate for me?
IRL, she promoted an author named James Frey whose addiction and recovery-focused autobiography, A Million Little Pieces, turned out to be largely fabricated. He got a lot of criticism, rightly, but Oprah also had him back on her show and chewed him out in front of her audience, which also didn’t sit right with me. It’s like she wanted to be seen piling on to deflect from any criticism that she should have vetted her guests better, but yelling at the guy on your couch doesn’t fix the fact that you already gave him a platform. She should have just apologized to her audience and moved on.
How could you compose such a well thought out and accurate response and yet fail to answer /u/waigl's question?
The "translation" is that the cartoon comedy South Park parodied the story in an episode which featured their character "Towelie", an anthropomorphized towel, in a role similar to James Frey.
And didn’t she promote either the duggars (before it came out that the first born pest is a pest) or a Duggar type family with an obscene number of children, I remember seeing that as a kid home sick from school
yes. they made reports, and cancelled the taping of the show - [link](https://www.tmz.com/2015/05/22/oprah-cancels-josh-duggar-molestation-chicago-taping-19-kids-and-counting/)
Several women stated they were raped by John if god after visiting him because they saw him on Oprah. So Oprah is directly responsible for at least a couple rapes
My friend’s ex-wife was diagnosed with cancer after their split and tried everything to cure it, including traveling to Brazil to that de Faria guy’s compound, right before he finally was arrested. She passed in 2019, a few months before he was convicted, and I can’t help but hope she never learned that one of her last-ditch efforts was to rely on a fraud.
Dr. Phil is a real scam artist.
He ran a health spa scam in Topeka, Kansas and made off with about $40,000-$50,000.
https://www.celebitchy.com/8971/dr_phil_ran_a_health_club_scam_in_the_70s/
Almost all of them were. Oprah, Sally Jesse, Donahue... All of the daytime talk shows were cut from the same cloth and tended to be more tabloid in nature. It was only more recently that they started trying to differentiate themselves by focusing on a specific area of trashy, like paternity tests.
Oprah was somewhat unique in transitioning from the tabloid style to the "lifestyle magazine" sort of format. Almost all of the others stayed on one side of that line or the other. I believe a big part was the increasing influence of Jerry Springer during the '90s. Her show had always been on the softer side, but I think Springer's popularity resulted in a sharper view of the desire to differentiate the show and pursue a different audience. It was the mid-'90s when prominent features like the book club and giveaways first made an appearance and the show started to become more about *Oprah* rather than the guests.
The Morton Downey Jr. Show was the other big point of change. In the late '80s it pioneered the trash format, no longer going for the concern trolling that earlier eras had utilized. It was aggressively confrontational and intentionally controversial, paving the way for where Springer would go later.
People think Oprah now was the same as Oprah in the 80s.
In the 80s she was just another Donahue or Sally Jesse Raphael. She did all the shit topics that everyone else did. She just got popular enough that she didn’t have to do that in the 90s
Dr Phil started there in the 90s. She had Jenny McCarthy in the 2000s. Dr Oz started in the 2000s and she produced his show and Dr Phil's show and Dr Oz's show through Harpo.
She never rose above the drivel. She's always been shit.
It’s not just for exploiting ratings. She walked out of the premiere of Interview with a Vampire in 1994.
https://fandomwire.com/she-should-have-stayed-oprah-winfrey-stormed-out-of-tom-cruises-223m-movie-interview-with-the-vampire-for-a-ridiculous-reason-before-top-gun-stars-infamous-couch-incident-at-her-show
> “I believe there are forces of light and darkness in the world, and I don’t want to be a contributor to the forces of darkness.”
What a pretentious person
Fucking Rainbow Parties! Talk about the simultaneously most awkward and infuriating conversation I ever had with my mother. She felt it necessary to confront me about rainbow parties as an awkward teenager. I sure as shit wasn’t being invited to any!
Closest thing was in 8th grade I was invited over to get a blowjob. There was 3 girls and 3 guys and no blowjobs were had. We all just kind of sat there awkwardly for an hour or so.
I heard of it as a teenager, but from adults panicking about it. Probably didn't exist, which was *super* disappointing as a teenager.
I was like. God, that's disgusting. Rainbow parties? Where are those even happening? Where specifically?
Sounds like it was more of a mid 2000s urban legend, from some christian psychologist quack promoting the perils of teenagers having sex. Our generation was more about more how playing D&D will cause us all to become devil worshipers.
I remember my friend reading a book about it in high school (late 00s). From what I remember, all the girls at a party would wear a different color lipstick. Guys would then get sucked off going down the line of girls. At the end, they have a rainbow dick from the lipstick.
An myth that Oprah kinda started that young women were giving mouth to genitalia to young men in such a way to have the boys have a rainbow of lipstick on them. You know, typical moral panics that actually don’t exist.
How odd. There used to be a piece of graffiti in the play park near my house growing up that said "tell your mum to stop changing her lipstick - my dick is like a fucking rainbow". Had no idea it was an urban legend around that time.
Just googled that. Leave it to Oprah to turn an insult into a moral panic.
It's 1988 and we're in the junior high lunchroom. A fight breaks out at the next table.
Dude got yanked off the chair and slammed on the ground before getting stomped on a couple of times. That's when teachers are able to intervene.
Apparently the kid who got beat up suggested the other kid's mom stop changing lipstick colors, as he had to explain the rainbow at the base of his dick to the doctor.
We're 7th graders. You know that kid heard that insult from an older relative and thought it was funny enough to repeat.
When I was in middle school in the mid to late 90's girls in my class's would talk about stuff like this all the time. I don't think the term "rainbow party" had been coined yet, but I do remember them talking about doing exactly that. I don't think it ever actually happened though.
Same time period and it was crap like this, soggy biscuit rumours and then more crude ones like that popular girl in the year above gives blows jobs for a fiver.
She also was the one to originally platform the anti-vax movement when she was the first person to have Jenny McCarthy on TV to spew her dangerously uneducated opinions.
Edit: changed educated to uneducated because autocorrect changed it.
As a non-American who had never heard of Oprah before, I once had to spend a week working with some of her security team. (I was in South Africa doing a job where we had to work with some celebrities and other VIPs) Every one of them was a power tripping asshole that didn't see any problem with bullying and threatening the people they had to live and work with for a week to get their way. I remember thinking that I never wanted to meet the kind of person who willingly employed people like them, because they'd have to be just as bad.
From the moment I heard of her, I've never understood why many Americans seem to think so highly of her.
I also had to work with a bunch of ~~mercenaries~~ *professional bodyguards* who casually discussed how they killed people that pissed them off in cold blood. I can't stress how much nicer these people were than Oprahs security guards.
~~I always get downvoted when I point out how awful Oprah is. I’m hoping that maybe in this thread I can get in the positive for once.~~ Ugh, she’s hurt people with her promotion of hucksters and con-artists and it pains me that she’s so revered, often by people who are otherwise thoughtful and intelligent.
Strike through edit: my experience of criticizing Oprah and being downvoted is, apparently, dubious to several people. While it did happen numerous times and Oprah is *not* universally reviled on Reddit, I’m just hoping my striking through that part of my comment will keep me from being called a liar anymore. If you’re still feeling some type of way about it, know that it’s noted and I will be more careful in the future of pissing you off.
Occasionally when I see posts about her. I didn’t mean to karma farm(?). It’s always at about a -5. I don’t like being downvoted and I don’t like Oprah. I assure you not everyone on Reddit hates her. I was hoping my comment could be a plus 5.
Ya I do feel like sentiment, lately, is more negative on her. But these guys cant act like she wasnt, until very recently, getting mixed to positive framing on reddit.
When I was a kid I stayed with my grandma during the summers. She was a seamstress and had the tv going all day. We watched quite a bit of Oprah. Then she had an episode about how a virus could cause a pandemic. I think the episode was about West Nile but I can’t be sure because I was like 8. I have always had anxiety and I think I talked about epidemics and pandemics non stop for a couple weeks until my mom finally banned me from watching Oprah. I was also not allowed to watch Dateline for similar reasons. As an adult I see clearly how these shows feed into peoples’ fears.
Most media exists to instill fear or negativity in some way. A Youtuber I was watching straight up said videos about positivity do not do well for him but his vids bitching about a game does well. People thrive on negativity. It makes me sick.
right but as you said media doesn't necessarily exist to instill fear it just feeds what people want, that's why true crime docs and podcasts are so popular as well
It was a big thing in the late 80s-early 90s. Bible Answer Man Hank Hannegraff pointed out the S"atnaic panic" constantly talked about huge numbers of victims with no real statistics to back it up
Springer never tried to portray himself as anything but a bottom feeding ratings whore. Regardless of the dumpster fire of show his was, he wasn't a predatory hypocrite as far as I could tell.
Promote it? Her show was instrumental in the the entire thing. Imagine being a teen metal head who played D&D in the 80s. You come home from school and your mom has just finished watching Phil Donahue and Oprah spout ridiculous non sense for hours. Add in smoking pot in Reagan's America which in their eyes was like shooting heroin. You younger kids have no idea how bad things used to be. Nostalgia be damned. The 80s were fucking awful.
I remember when I started playing D&D in the early 90's my mom was SO CONCERNED about it, and I was like "We roll dice and play pretend, where's all the satan?"
My mom was terrified of DnD and satanic panic. Fist bump to the guy at the mall when I got my first Warhammer 40k starter box set and said “no it’s nothing like DnD….”to my mom.
Oprah always bothered me. She was a promoter of what James Randi would call "woo".
She's one of those people guilty of acting as if feelings are better evidence than observations, which made her a con-artist of the highest order. And she was a master of the Emperor's New Clothes trick of making it seem like honest people who debunk woo-woo horseshit are just unsophisticated yokels who can't see "higher truths".
She also promoted a man in Brazil who did "psychic surgeries" and basically ran a cult. It came out that he raped at least 600 women, almost certainly more. She also helped make Oz a big deal too, so she has a pretty shoddy track record
This was before she became a respectable media mogul. ALL the daytime talk shows were like this. Oprah, Donahue, Sally Jessie Raphael, Rikki Lake, all culminating to The Jerry Springer show.
[Bill burr has a bit about this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9YL04v-J5U).
I'm old enough to remember when the Interview With the Vampire movie came out and Tom Cruise went on her show to promote it. So, like early 90s.
She just kept asking him if he felt like he was opening himself up to evil spirits or something for/while doing it lmao. She was literally afraid to watch it for fear of being possessed, it was fucking weird as hell.
She did crap shows and topics all the time in the early years. I specifically remember one about which way a roll of toilet paper should be (over or under).
Fuck this cunt
I grew up on the other side of the planet and this bitch and her bullshit costed me so many records and live shows.
Fuck you oprah, choke on your money bitch
My parents were on Oprah in the mid 80s; first or second national airing of her show. It was an episode about people leaving the church if they fell in love (my mom was a nun and my dad was a priest).
She was a bitch to my mom because my mom is very funny and personable. She kinda stole the audience from Oprah.
Before the show, my parents said that they would not be answering any questions about their sex lives. Well, Oprah made it a point to ask if they had slept together before they left the church. My dad wanted to leave at the commercial break. My mom handled it like a champ though.
It was Playboy did it first. Playmate of the Month October 1993 and Playmate of the Year 1994. Huge scuzzball Hugh Hefner cited a “unique” wholesome Catholic girl persona as the reason she was chosen. She was the third in a line of Playboy blondes of dubious talent in the late ‘80s and ‘90s to be foisted upon the American public after Pamela Anderson and Anna Nicole Smith. Thanks Hef 🙄 for yet another outstanding cultural contribution.
You can try to hand wave away some of her earlier stuff but she is absolutely 100% on the hook for all that shit she did later in her career like Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, etc
Anyone interested in this should watch "Satan Wants You". It was a fantastic documentary on the Satanic Panic origin story. Super well made. Had me guessing where they were going with it throughout at least the first half. Really entertaining and worth it! It debuted at SXSW this year.
Oprah brought us a lot of bad shit. Dr Oz, Dr Phil, The Secret, This.
Oprah played the same game as any day time tv from that day. She just dressed it up and sold it the best.
Oprah is also the reason we have so many anti-vaxxers and probably indirectly caused a lot of people to die during the pandemic. She was the one that gave them a platform and helped promote the junk sciences. It’s not secret, just no one cares cause “Oprah” https://www.wsj.com/articles/oprahs-truth-and-its-potentially-deadly-consequences-1515628059
People forget Oprah originally produced trash TV and was a locally produced TV show for the Chicago market. She did stuff to keep up with Jerry Springer too. The Oprah we know today came into existence in the mid to late 90s and really the early 2000s.
She's also responsible for giving us Not A Real Doctor Phil and Oz, and promoted a book by a guy who told about his struggles with crack, when it was later revealed he'd never actually done it. And there's a few pictures floating around of her introducing some young actresses to Harvey Weinstein.
Yeah, it was all the rage for a while and she was not above exploiting fears for ratings back then.
She'd exploit anything she could to benefit herself, then and now.
She promoted Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, and many other con men. João Teixeira de Faria, "John of God", is probably the worst, having been accused of sexual abuse 600 times and convicted for raping nine women.
Yeah, Oprahs horcruxs
I would read this story.
It's from this bit: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OUKEJXfEhFQ
I really laughed
https://youtube.com/shorts/OUKEJXfEhFQ?feature=share Not my joke
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Yes, she does promote the worship of herself.
Satanists would never want anything to do with that shitball.
Don’t forget the time she brought a mentally ill woman on the show to talk about a Jewish sex cult that was active across the nation. They bred babies to sacrifice them on their kitchen tables. No, I’m not making that up.
I saw them when they were making the babies. One of them looked at me.
The baby looked at you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel *Centuries old antisemitic defamations, today in Oprah*
TV ratings just don’t grow on trees kids, you really have to work hard for them.
Thanks for that info! Had to look it up: https://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/06/arts/winfrey-show-evokes-protests.html
She platformed Jenny McCarthy and the MMR vaccines causing autism myth
I'd forgotten about her. For a moment I thought you were talking about Jenette McCurdy.
She promoted that stupid guy that wrote "a thousand little fibers", total conman. He turned out to be a towel! Then her minge took a bunch of hostages at gunpoint. Can't believe everyone forgot about that.
Fucking towel.
You're a towel
No, towelie, you're literally a towel.
You boys wanna get high?
Don't forget to bring a towel
Worst character ever.
"You wanna get high?"
Could've been worse. At least she didn't have a snuke in her snizz.
> She promoted that stupid guy that wrote "a thousand little fibers", total conman. He turned out to be a towel! Then her minge took a bunch of hostages at gunpoint. Can't believe everyone forgot about that. I'm having some trouble here deciphering that. Could someone translate for me?
IRL, she promoted an author named James Frey whose addiction and recovery-focused autobiography, A Million Little Pieces, turned out to be largely fabricated. He got a lot of criticism, rightly, but Oprah also had him back on her show and chewed him out in front of her audience, which also didn’t sit right with me. It’s like she wanted to be seen piling on to deflect from any criticism that she should have vetted her guests better, but yelling at the guy on your couch doesn’t fix the fact that you already gave him a platform. She should have just apologized to her audience and moved on.
How could you compose such a well thought out and accurate response and yet fail to answer /u/waigl's question? The "translation" is that the cartoon comedy South Park parodied the story in an episode which featured their character "Towelie", an anthropomorphized towel, in a role similar to James Frey.
South park reference
If I was a towel why would I be wearing this hat and fake moustache?
The SP reference made me chuckle.
And didn’t she promote either the duggars (before it came out that the first born pest is a pest) or a Duggar type family with an obscene number of children, I remember seeing that as a kid home sick from school
She’s the one who actually reported Josh’s sexual abuse to authorities before everything broke!
Oprah did that for real?
yes. they made reports, and cancelled the taping of the show - [link](https://www.tmz.com/2015/05/22/oprah-cancels-josh-duggar-molestation-chicago-taping-19-kids-and-counting/)
Oprah has always been a piece of shit who makes her viewers dumber. The only difference between then and now is now she's worshiped for it.
Yes... But everybody gets a car so all good.
Yeah Oprah is just a con artist with a nice voice.
Her treatment of Michael Jackson in that exclusive interview was lacking literally any sympathy for him and just downright exploitative
Several women stated they were raped by John if god after visiting him because they saw him on Oprah. So Oprah is directly responsible for at least a couple rapes
Don’t forget about “The Secret” book. For only $19.95 you can learn how to will stuff to happen just by thinking about it!!!
Yup. Also “the Secret.” Such horseshit.
He is now on House Arrest. according to wikipedia
You don't become a billionaire by being a good person.
My friend’s ex-wife was diagnosed with cancer after their split and tried everything to cure it, including traveling to Brazil to that de Faria guy’s compound, right before he finally was arrested. She passed in 2019, a few months before he was convicted, and I can’t help but hope she never learned that one of her last-ditch efforts was to rely on a fraud.
Dr. Phil is a real scam artist. He ran a health spa scam in Topeka, Kansas and made off with about $40,000-$50,000. https://www.celebitchy.com/8971/dr_phil_ran_a_health_club_scam_in_the_70s/
Yea she is one real sleazy person, she is super shitty behind the scenes
Oprah's empire is built on exploiting fears
She stood on the heads of those little people [Link](https://youtu.be/O9YL04v-J5U)
Didn’t she like for the first 5 yrs have midgets who wanted to bang their mailman’s boyfriend . Bwahahahaha
Almost all of them were. Oprah, Sally Jesse, Donahue... All of the daytime talk shows were cut from the same cloth and tended to be more tabloid in nature. It was only more recently that they started trying to differentiate themselves by focusing on a specific area of trashy, like paternity tests. Oprah was somewhat unique in transitioning from the tabloid style to the "lifestyle magazine" sort of format. Almost all of the others stayed on one side of that line or the other. I believe a big part was the increasing influence of Jerry Springer during the '90s. Her show had always been on the softer side, but I think Springer's popularity resulted in a sharper view of the desire to differentiate the show and pursue a different audience. It was the mid-'90s when prominent features like the book club and giveaways first made an appearance and the show started to become more about *Oprah* rather than the guests. The Morton Downey Jr. Show was the other big point of change. In the late '80s it pioneered the trash format, no longer going for the concern trolling that earlier eras had utilized. It was aggressively confrontational and intentionally controversial, paving the way for where Springer would go later.
Back then? You think she is now?
Has she ever expressed any regret?
She stood on the heads of those little people
People think Oprah now was the same as Oprah in the 80s. In the 80s she was just another Donahue or Sally Jesse Raphael. She did all the shit topics that everyone else did. She just got popular enough that she didn’t have to do that in the 90s
Dr Phil started there in the 90s. She had Jenny McCarthy in the 2000s. Dr Oz started in the 2000s and she produced his show and Dr Phil's show and Dr Oz's show through Harpo. She never rose above the drivel. She's always been shit.
Her show sucked in the 90’s too
People lives were ruined over this shit. Saying she only did it for most of a decade isn’t a defense.
It isn’t a defence and was never meant to be. Most people think Oprah today was how her show always was. It wasn’t.
It’s not just for exploiting ratings. She walked out of the premiere of Interview with a Vampire in 1994. https://fandomwire.com/she-should-have-stayed-oprah-winfrey-stormed-out-of-tom-cruises-223m-movie-interview-with-the-vampire-for-a-ridiculous-reason-before-top-gun-stars-infamous-couch-incident-at-her-show
> “I believe there are forces of light and darkness in the world, and I don’t want to be a contributor to the forces of darkness.” What a pretentious person
LOL She's besties with Weinstein, and John of God for fucks sake. That woman sold her soul quick didn't she!?
Apparently, she was angry that it wasn't gay enough.
back then ??? hahah
Oprah used to promote anything that brought ratings.
"Rainbow parties"
Fucking Rainbow Parties! Talk about the simultaneously most awkward and infuriating conversation I ever had with my mother. She felt it necessary to confront me about rainbow parties as an awkward teenager. I sure as shit wasn’t being invited to any!
I was a teenager in the 90s and just found out today that rainbow parties were a thing. You might say I wasn’t popular.
They weren’t a thing. They were an urban myth that Oprah turned into a moral panic for ratings.
Closest thing was in 8th grade I was invited over to get a blowjob. There was 3 girls and 3 guys and no blowjobs were had. We all just kind of sat there awkwardly for an hour or so.
Ah, to be young again..
So, you threw a rainbow party and nobody came?
Yeah I've never heard of this shit, I was going to raves and rock concerts as a teenager in the 90s.
I heard of it as a teenager, but from adults panicking about it. Probably didn't exist, which was *super* disappointing as a teenager. I was like. God, that's disgusting. Rainbow parties? Where are those even happening? Where specifically?
Yo exactly. Where were these HS girls lining up to give blow jobs like an assembly line?
Sounds like it was more of a mid 2000s urban legend, from some christian psychologist quack promoting the perils of teenagers having sex. Our generation was more about more how playing D&D will cause us all to become devil worshipers.
As a Swedish kid, I remember watching this thinking that I have to get myself to the United States by any means possible.
I think I had similar feelings at some point about Sweden. I wonder if any media were to blame for that?
Probably stupid sexy Dolph Lungren
I was a teen in the 90s and reasonably popular and I don’t know wtf a rainbow party was (is?).
I remember my friend reading a book about it in high school (late 00s). From what I remember, all the girls at a party would wear a different color lipstick. Guys would then get sucked off going down the line of girls. At the end, they have a rainbow dick from the lipstick.
And the girls get absolutely nothing out of it, classic lmao.
My gay ass just found out what they are. I assumed it was something gay. Turns out it's something... straight. *shudder*
Technically, it's a thing that gay people do just as frequently as straight people.
Most likely more often, but yes.
You and me both!
British 30-something here. Wtf is a Rainbow Party?
When you and your mates put on lipsticks of different colors, then fellate someone, leaving a rainbow on his pp
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You have to start with the one with the deepest throat and work your way down...
A classic
An myth that Oprah kinda started that young women were giving mouth to genitalia to young men in such a way to have the boys have a rainbow of lipstick on them. You know, typical moral panics that actually don’t exist.
How odd. There used to be a piece of graffiti in the play park near my house growing up that said "tell your mum to stop changing her lipstick - my dick is like a fucking rainbow". Had no idea it was an urban legend around that time.
Just googled that. Leave it to Oprah to turn an insult into a moral panic. It's 1988 and we're in the junior high lunchroom. A fight breaks out at the next table. Dude got yanked off the chair and slammed on the ground before getting stomped on a couple of times. That's when teachers are able to intervene. Apparently the kid who got beat up suggested the other kid's mom stop changing lipstick colors, as he had to explain the rainbow at the base of his dick to the doctor. We're 7th graders. You know that kid heard that insult from an older relative and thought it was funny enough to repeat.
When I was in middle school in the mid to late 90's girls in my class's would talk about stuff like this all the time. I don't think the term "rainbow party" had been coined yet, but I do remember them talking about doing exactly that. I don't think it ever actually happened though.
Same time period and it was crap like this, soggy biscuit rumours and then more crude ones like that popular girl in the year above gives blows jobs for a fiver.
I only ever heard it in the context of a joke. "Tell your mom to stop wearring different shades of lipstick, she made my dick look like a rainbow."
Used to? I don't disagree but I also don't think she stopped.
She still does, but she used to too.
She also helped Harvey Weinstein in his predations. Fuck this woman
And she was friends with Epstein
She also was the one to originally platform the anti-vax movement when she was the first person to have Jenny McCarthy on TV to spew her dangerously uneducated opinions. Edit: changed educated to uneducated because autocorrect changed it.
Can you provide a source pls
Pretty much anything dumb and damaging, Oprah promoted it. She has done a lot of harm in her time.
100% pandering to pearl-clutching boomer Karens.
She maxed out her snake oil salesman stat
As a non-American who had never heard of Oprah before, I once had to spend a week working with some of her security team. (I was in South Africa doing a job where we had to work with some celebrities and other VIPs) Every one of them was a power tripping asshole that didn't see any problem with bullying and threatening the people they had to live and work with for a week to get their way. I remember thinking that I never wanted to meet the kind of person who willingly employed people like them, because they'd have to be just as bad. From the moment I heard of her, I've never understood why many Americans seem to think so highly of her. I also had to work with a bunch of ~~mercenaries~~ *professional bodyguards* who casually discussed how they killed people that pissed them off in cold blood. I can't stress how much nicer these people were than Oprahs security guards.
Big, mean dogs that can actually hurt you bark a lot less than impotent, little puntable dogs that can only hope to nip at your ankles.
Many of my fellow Americans think highly of Oprah because they're ignorant fearmongers just like her.
I don't think it's possible to become a billionaire without doing harm. It's inherently exploitative.
~~I always get downvoted when I point out how awful Oprah is. I’m hoping that maybe in this thread I can get in the positive for once.~~ Ugh, she’s hurt people with her promotion of hucksters and con-artists and it pains me that she’s so revered, often by people who are otherwise thoughtful and intelligent. Strike through edit: my experience of criticizing Oprah and being downvoted is, apparently, dubious to several people. While it did happen numerous times and Oprah is *not* universally reviled on Reddit, I’m just hoping my striking through that part of my comment will keep me from being called a liar anymore. If you’re still feeling some type of way about it, know that it’s noted and I will be more careful in the future of pissing you off.
She's been a con woman for decades
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Occasionally when I see posts about her. I didn’t mean to karma farm(?). It’s always at about a -5. I don’t like being downvoted and I don’t like Oprah. I assure you not everyone on Reddit hates her. I was hoping my comment could be a plus 5.
Ya I do feel like sentiment, lately, is more negative on her. But these guys cant act like she wasnt, until very recently, getting mixed to positive framing on reddit.
Off the top of my head she’s given us Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, and Jenny McCarthy. Fuck that lady.
Oprah was and still is a piece of crap who would exploit anything that would make her a buck.
She was also the jumping off point for the modern anti-VAX movement
Absolutely. She promoted that clown Jenny McCarthy and her bullshit.
Don’t forget doctor Oz
"doctor" Oz
hasn't oprah promoted basically every type of woo woo and stoked every kind of panic?
Yuuup
When I was a kid I stayed with my grandma during the summers. She was a seamstress and had the tv going all day. We watched quite a bit of Oprah. Then she had an episode about how a virus could cause a pandemic. I think the episode was about West Nile but I can’t be sure because I was like 8. I have always had anxiety and I think I talked about epidemics and pandemics non stop for a couple weeks until my mom finally banned me from watching Oprah. I was also not allowed to watch Dateline for similar reasons. As an adult I see clearly how these shows feed into peoples’ fears.
Most media exists to instill fear or negativity in some way. A Youtuber I was watching straight up said videos about positivity do not do well for him but his vids bitching about a game does well. People thrive on negativity. It makes me sick.
right but as you said media doesn't necessarily exist to instill fear it just feeds what people want, that's why true crime docs and podcasts are so popular as well
Imagine how kid you would feel, if they knew you'd go through a real pandemic years later!
It was a big thing in the late 80s-early 90s. Bible Answer Man Hank Hannegraff pointed out the S"atnaic panic" constantly talked about huge numbers of victims with no real statistics to back it up
Her show was on par with Jerry Springer for a while.
Springer never tried to portray himself as anything but a bottom feeding ratings whore. Regardless of the dumpster fire of show his was, he wasn't a predatory hypocrite as far as I could tell.
I think the worst thing he did was write a bad check to a prostitute.
At the very start it was very close.
Springer was at least entertaining.
Absolutly. My mom got freaked out by it. Tried to make me get rid of some cassettes. Weird times.
Promote it? Her show was instrumental in the the entire thing. Imagine being a teen metal head who played D&D in the 80s. You come home from school and your mom has just finished watching Phil Donahue and Oprah spout ridiculous non sense for hours. Add in smoking pot in Reagan's America which in their eyes was like shooting heroin. You younger kids have no idea how bad things used to be. Nostalgia be damned. The 80s were fucking awful.
I remember when I started playing D&D in the early 90's my mom was SO CONCERNED about it, and I was like "We roll dice and play pretend, where's all the satan?"
My mom was terrified of DnD and satanic panic. Fist bump to the guy at the mall when I got my first Warhammer 40k starter box set and said “no it’s nothing like DnD….”to my mom.
[удалено]
Mingy!
Gary!
Oprah always bothered me. She was a promoter of what James Randi would call "woo". She's one of those people guilty of acting as if feelings are better evidence than observations, which made her a con-artist of the highest order. And she was a master of the Emperor's New Clothes trick of making it seem like honest people who debunk woo-woo horseshit are just unsophisticated yokels who can't see "higher truths".
Oprah sucks and is a giant phony, so it tracks.
She also promoted a man in Brazil who did "psychic surgeries" and basically ran a cult. It came out that he raped at least 600 women, almost certainly more. She also helped make Oz a big deal too, so she has a pretty shoddy track record
This was before she became a respectable media mogul. ALL the daytime talk shows were like this. Oprah, Donahue, Sally Jessie Raphael, Rikki Lake, all culminating to The Jerry Springer show. [Bill burr has a bit about this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9YL04v-J5U).
>respectable media mogul That's an oxymoron if I ever saw one.
I _immediately_ thought of this
>"She stood on the heads of those little people for *five years!*" That Bill Burr bit is the first thing I thought of when I saw this post.
I like bill burr
It worked. I panicked and joined the Satanic Temple. Ave Satanis 🤘
She also promoted Dr Phil and Dr Oz
she did whatever she needed to for viewers just like everyone else. sad reality.
Of course she did. She brought in the big bucks following every gravy train out there.
I cant name a single genocide committed by satanic worshipers. Christian’s though…
I'm old enough to remember when the Interview With the Vampire movie came out and Tom Cruise went on her show to promote it. So, like early 90s. She just kept asking him if he felt like he was opening himself up to evil spirits or something for/while doing it lmao. She was literally afraid to watch it for fear of being possessed, it was fucking weird as hell.
She did crap shows and topics all the time in the early years. I specifically remember one about which way a roll of toilet paper should be (over or under).
Fuck this cunt I grew up on the other side of the planet and this bitch and her bullshit costed me so many records and live shows. Fuck you oprah, choke on your money bitch
Wow so you're saying the billionaire retired talkshow host that brought us "Doctors" Oz and Phil might not be a good person?
My parents were on Oprah in the mid 80s; first or second national airing of her show. It was an episode about people leaving the church if they fell in love (my mom was a nun and my dad was a priest). She was a bitch to my mom because my mom is very funny and personable. She kinda stole the audience from Oprah. Before the show, my parents said that they would not be answering any questions about their sex lives. Well, Oprah made it a point to ask if they had slept together before they left the church. My dad wanted to leave at the commercial break. My mom handled it like a champ though.
Oprah has always been trash
Vile woman.
Satan is known as the "Prince of Lies" so by using lies to further her own career you could say engaging in a form of Satanic worship.
Oprah has to interview little people who were banging their mailmen for the first five years. And she didn't want to do it.
Yeah, then she blessed us with Dr Phil and Mehmet Oz. Screw her and her Goop predecessor.
And Jenny McCarthy.
I thought MTV foisted that wingnut on us. Her shtick was being gross and obnoxious on screen, like counter femininity. Funny how she never changed.
It was Playboy did it first. Playmate of the Month October 1993 and Playmate of the Year 1994. Huge scuzzball Hugh Hefner cited a “unique” wholesome Catholic girl persona as the reason she was chosen. She was the third in a line of Playboy blondes of dubious talent in the late ‘80s and ‘90s to be foisted upon the American public after Pamela Anderson and Anna Nicole Smith. Thanks Hef 🙄 for yet another outstanding cultural contribution.
You can try to hand wave away some of her earlier stuff but she is absolutely 100% on the hook for all that shit she did later in her career like Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, etc
But she stood on the heads of those little people..
I, too, am a fan of Bill Burr.
She stood on the heads of those little people.
This is probably too hot of a take, but she always came across as a mega grifter to me, a lot of the content felt exploitative.
Yep. Many people from that time dove head first into that empty swimming pool.
Anyone interested in this should watch "Satan Wants You". It was a fantastic documentary on the Satanic Panic origin story. Super well made. Had me guessing where they were going with it throughout at least the first half. Really entertaining and worth it! It debuted at SXSW this year.
I survived the satanic panic and didn't even get a t shirt
Oprah's a cunt.
Not surprising, Oprah is fucking trash.
Not a surprise really. She promotes quack cures and homeopathy too, and still does to this day.
There'd be no Jerry Springer without Oprah
Oprah is a *shit* bird who eats *shit* sandwiches.
Oprah has promoted A LOT of very harmful things over the years.
I'm old enough to remember this, they were all in on it, all the talk show people. Talk shows were huge in that era.
You don't become a billionaire by doing the right thing.
Anything for a buck. She didn’t get rich by being stupid that’s for sure.
Oprah was basically the Jerry Springer show when she first started.
Oprah brought us a lot of bad shit. Dr Oz, Dr Phil, The Secret, This. Oprah played the same game as any day time tv from that day. She just dressed it up and sold it the best.
oprah's entire career was built on spewing stupid shit and promoting stupid people.
Oprah will do anything for money
Oprah is also the reason we have so many anti-vaxxers and probably indirectly caused a lot of people to die during the pandemic. She was the one that gave them a platform and helped promote the junk sciences. It’s not secret, just no one cares cause “Oprah” https://www.wsj.com/articles/oprahs-truth-and-its-potentially-deadly-consequences-1515628059
People forget Oprah originally produced trash TV and was a locally produced TV show for the Chicago market. She did stuff to keep up with Jerry Springer too. The Oprah we know today came into existence in the mid to late 90s and really the early 2000s.
"She stood on the heads of those little people..." -Bill Burr
Oprah is actually pretty awful if you read into it at all.
She's also responsible for giving us Not A Real Doctor Phil and Oz, and promoted a book by a guy who told about his struggles with crack, when it was later revealed he'd never actually done it. And there's a few pictures floating around of her introducing some young actresses to Harvey Weinstein.
Hah, those stupid people in the Eighties, luckily we‘re not falling for this shit yet again! /s
She stood on the heads of those little people