Something about Oprah Winfrey has always rubbed me the wrong way. Mostly it's the manipulative manner in which she serves as America's official self-appointed self-help guru despite having no credentials with which to qualify her for the post. (Prior to getting her own talk show she'd been a local news anchor and had acted in one movie.) Her reaction after being refused entry to a closed Hermes boutique in Paris last year is but one example of the abusive manner with which she wields her power. And that power has become so massive that even the once unflappable David Letterman was reduced to meek ass-kissing when Winfrey finally agreed to appear on his show last fall.

But in the aftermath of her cruel, self-serving public humiliation of discredited memoirist James Frey, more people are beginning to openly question Winfrey's role in American culture. One example of this is a lengthy story from yesterday's Boston Phoenix by writer Mark Jurkowitz:

The 52-year-old Oprah, who Forbes estimates has a net worth of $1.4 billion, has amassed almost unfathomable power and influence through a feel-good empire of confession, redemption, and self-help magnified through the multimedia megaphone that includes everything from her talk show and magazine to her film company. By touting anything, from books to bras, she can inspire mega-mass consumption and move markets.

One of her few public doubters, author and cultural critic Chris Lehmann, recalls the 2004 show when Oprah bought 276 Pontiacs for her studio audience (without telling them that they would owe up to $7000 in taxes). "At that moment," he says, "she could have given them an AK47 and told them to kill anyone." He attributes her incredible success to the idea that "she's cleared out this kind of therapist-priest space in the culture" and combined it with "a cult of personality."

And that's what's ultimately so scary about Oprah. She puts the "cult" in pop culture.

Jurkowitz also notes that Winfrey's double standards are sometimes glaring:

After winning a legal battle against Texas cattlemen who sued her after a 1996 show in which she observed that mad-cow disease deterred her from eating another burger, Oprah, according to news reports, rejoiced that "Free speech not only lives, it rocks." (In another example of her commercial power, Oprah's hamburger denunciation helped depress cattle prices.) But Oprah was on the other side of the free-speech issue when she waged a successful legal battle against a former employee who was trying to overturn a confidentiality agreement that bars her employees from writing about Oprah's business or personal affairs for the rest of their lives.

Even celebrities have begun offering critiques of Winfrey's behavior. In his February 10th column in Entertainment Weekly, novelist Stephen King offered the following observation about the Frey fracas:

Did Oprah come out of her bout with Frey unmarked? Each viewer will judge for himself, but I was made uncomfortable by how many times I heard her say he "embarrassed" her. In the book world, Ms. Winfrey is a person of great power. The unstated warning of her cool and methodical dismantling of James Frey seems to have been Embarrass the Book Queen and the Book Queen will get you back double, in front of millions... and your editor, too.

Surely there are more important lessons to be learned here.

What has begun to trouble me most about Winfrey is the recent franchising of her brand name. First, she gave Dr. Phil McGraw his own TV show in 2002, and now she's preparing one hosted by Food Network star Rachael Ray. Notably, the one thing Winfrey shares with her two proteges is a lack of any discernible expertise. While Dr. Phil does (remarkably) have a Ph.D. in psychology, he seems to spend a lot of time (and book chapters) telling people how to lose weight. Not only is he not a medical doctor or a dietitian, he's overweight himself. As for Ray, the so-called celebrity "chef" has never been to culinary school.

Fittingly, James Frey's own "expert" status was attained only after Winfrey promoted him as such on her show last year. In the end, one has to wonder: was she upset that he lied, or just that he got caught? After all, if one fraud can be exposed, so can the rest.

[thePhoenix.com] Attack of the 50-foot Oprah (via TV Squad)
[EW.com] The Pop of King: Frey's Lies