8/6/2019 How Oprah Winfrey Changed America

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How Oprah Winfrey Changed America

Oprah Winfrey was not the first person to host a talk show on television. But she revolutionized the

genre. And with her grand personality, her multi-platform business plan and her relentless messages

of positivity and self-improvement, she managed to infiltrate American life from all angles.

This week, as Oprah's show airs its final episode 25 years after it began, insights are beginning to

emerge about just how deeply she has influenced our lives.

Oprah didn't just transform daytime talk shows from gossipy to intimate, after all. She also broke

down the traditional barriers of journalism. She transformed the book-publishing industry. She made

the very private very public. And she prepared a mass audience to celebrate differences among

people, regardless of color, disabilities or sexual orientation.

"I cannot understate the impact that she has had on our culture," said Mary McNamara, a television

critic at the Los Angeles Times. "You see it everywhere, from the explosion of memoirs to social

media to journalists sharing their own opinions and own stories. That all started with Oprah."

Before Oprah, talk-show hosts of the 1960s, such as Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas,

stuck with celebrity guests and objective discussions about politics, music, movies and other aspects

of pop culture, said Janice Peck, an expert in media and culture at the University of Colorado,

Boulder, and author of "The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era."

In the 1970s, Phil Donahue became the first host to invite everyday people onto his show and to

walk the aisles, inviting the audience to join the conversation. Soon after, Barbara Walters began

shocking viewers of 20/20 by asking questions that sometimes made her celebrity guests cry.

But when Oprah entered the talk show scene in 1986, she "just blew the whole thing open,"McNamara said. "The only thing she was interested in was what made you feel, what made you cry,

what you were scared of, what you were proud of. She was interviewing people as if she was talking

to a child, getting to the bare emotional core."

While hosts like Geraldo Rivera and Sally Jessy Raphael were pursuing similar formats, Oprah first set

her self apart in a pivotal episode in November 1987. The show featured both victims of sexual

abuse and their molesters. During the conversation, Oprah confessed that she, too, had been

molested as a child.

"When she did that, she changed the nature of journalism," McNamara said. "She became part of 

the audience and part of the people she was interviewing. She blurred everything together."

Another turning point came in 1994. By then, Oprah was getting sucked into the demand for

sensationalism on talk shows hosted by Jerry Springer, Ricki Lake, Montel Williams and others.

Deliberately, she made a decision to separate herself from what she called the "trash pack." Instead,

she focused on positive, therapeutic and inspiring themes, aiming to help people to find their best

selves.

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With those messages, Peck said, Oprah managed to both satisfy and create a growing demand for

 just what she had to offer. The 1980s and 1990s were a period when the country was moving

rightward politically toward a period of neoliberalism, according to Peck, with a cultural emphasis on

the responsibility of individuals to look inward and change their own lives.

"She really tapped into a deeply American idea of self-transformation and the power of the mind,

that if we have the right attitude and positive thinking, we can transform our situation," Peck said.

"Her message resonated because it tapped into these powerful economic, political, spiritual and

social currents happening inside culture at the same time."

Oprah's message also resonated because she distributed it through a dizzying number of platforms,

including her talk show, her magazine, her book club and next, her new network. (OWN is a joint

venture between Oprah Winfrey and Discovery Communications.) These many Oprah outlets

continue to influence culture in countless ways.

The publishing industry, for one, has begun commissioning books that fit into the mold of Oprah's

book club picks, and the memoir genre has exploded since she started the club. Libraries

recommend books that are similar to Oprah's picks. And bookstores have entire sections devoted tobooks that she has recommended.

Even print journalists now look for opportunities to insert personal anecdotes into their articles. "In

news organizations," McNamara said, "you see this idea that a story hasn't been truly reported until

the reporter reports on the reporting."

Perhaps most of all, Oprah has taught people how to accept others who are not like them. Viewers

barely blink an eye at popular shows like "Modern Family" and "Glee," which feature gay couples

and kids in wheelchairs, said McNamara.

McNamara also pointed to a recent documentary about Cher's transgender son, Chaz, and his

transformation from woman to man. In the film, Chaz's grandmother says in an interview that she

accepts her grandson because she saw something similar on Oprah.

"This is Cher's son, growing up in a rarified atmosphere and exposed to all sorts of different people,"

McNamara said. "But it was Oprah who told this woman that it was OK to be transgender."

"That was the service she provided," she added. "She said we are all essentially the same. And she

celebrated our differences."