Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [135]
In her 1989 show titled “Date Rape,” Oprah said, “I know it will have liberated a lot of women who have been raped and never called it that. A major survey showed that eighty-seven percent of high-school boys believe they have the right to force a woman to have sex if they have spent money on a date—and forty-seven percent of girls agreed. It’s amazing to me that women buy into that attitude.”
On Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday in 1992 she announced that she would present shows throughout the year devoted to “Racism in America”:
“Racism in the Neighborhood”
“I Hate Your Interracial Relationship”
“Japanese Americans: The New Racism”
“Are We All Racist?”
“The Rodney King Verdict I and II”
“My Parent Is a Racist”
“An Experiment in Racism”
“Too Little, Too Late: Native Americans Speak Out”
“I Refuse to Date My Own Race”
“Unsolved Hate Crimes”
“White Men Who Fear Black Men”
She took her cameras to South Central Los Angeles in the wake of the riots that followed the acquittal of the white police officers who had beaten Rodney King, an African American. Bloody chaos erupted after the 1992 verdict, with the violent deaths of fifty-four people in one of the most deadly riots in U.S. history. South LA ignited into an inferno of 4,000 fires damaging 1,100 buildings, causing 2,382 injuries, and resulting in 13,212 arrests. That evening, television viewers watched in horror as Reginald Denny, a white man, was dragged from his truck and beaten by a black mob. President George Herbert Walker Bush finally sent in federal troops to restore order.
With the best of intentions, Oprah assembled a multiracial audience of whites, Asians, blacks, and Hispanics for her first taping in Los Angeles, but she ended up with a show of shrill militants, which prompted Howard Rosenberg to write in the Los Angeles Times that she was “overmatched in this withering onslaught of anger and outrage, watching helplessly as her studio full of warring multicultural guests screamed sound bites at each other.” One black woman justified the riots by saying, “We had to do something to get Oprah into LA to get people talking.” Rosenberg nearly despaired. “If this is talking,” he wrote, “bring back shouting.”
Despite the critics, Oprah maintained her position as the country’s number one talk show host among a growing field of competitors. Her program’s popularity and the intense loyalty of her female viewers made her the most influential voice in daytime television, and her made-for-television movies and specials had extended her audience, but she still wanted to engrave her presence in prime time. So, for her next network special, she and her executive producer, Debra DiMaio, cast their lines for a prize catch and managed to reel in Michael Jackson, the self-styled “King of Pop, Rock, and Soul,” who was then the subject of international curiosity. He had not done a live interview in fourteen years, but because it was Oprah offering ninety minutes of prime-time television, and possibly because his record sales had dropped along with his popularity, he agreed to sit down with her at his Neverland ranch in Santa Ynez, California. Oprah promised not to ask him if he was gay, but she said she wanted to give him a chance to address the bizarre rumors about him bleaching his skin, sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber, and having serial plastic surgeries.
In addition, she asked:
“Were your brothers jealous of you when you started getting all the attention?”
“Did your father beat you?”
“Are you a virgin?”
“Why do