Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [187]
He also took aim at her for presenting blatant medical quackery by endorsing a woman who described herself as a “medical intuitive,” who Oprah said was genuine because the woman had intuited that Oprah was worried about joint pain. As if a medical psychic, this woman diagnosed members of Oprah’s audience simply by having them stand and give their first names and ages. She told a man with chronic migraine headaches: “Life owes me an explanation. That thought is in your liver and so it’s burning. And what happens from the liver is there’s an energetic circuit and it goes right up to the brain channel. And that starts the fire neurologically and that’s why you have migraines.”
Oprah soon became a moving target for the mainstream media. Psychology Today lambasted her for contributing to lunacy. “It is apparently arrogant to think that psychiatrists, physicists, evolutionary scientists, and epidemiologists might know more about their areas of expertise than say, Oprah,” wrote Gad Saad, PhD, in an article about narcissistic celebrities who play doctor. A decade later Newsweek put Oprah on the cover (June 8, 2009), with an eleven-page article that castigated her for “crazy talk” and “wacky cures.” Like the Pardoner in The Canterbury Tales who sold fake relics and spurious indulgences, Oprah was blasted as irresponsible for not knowing the difference between useful medical information and New Age nonsense. This was a complete turnaround for the magazine that had lauded her eight years before with a breathless cover story proclaiming “The Age of Oprah,” saying, “She’s changing more lives than ever.” During her “Change Your Life” phase the magazine nicked her with a “Periscope” item titled “Oprah-Di, Oprah Da,” giving five takes on “The Big O”:
1. Good Riddance. It’s Springer time! Oprah’s feel-good blab is passé. What we require now is fights and sluts. Jerry! Jerry!
2. She’s a Ratings Martyr. She knew she’d lose fans with her self-help focus, and knew Beloved was a tough sell. But she needs to better us!
3. O Is for Get Over Yourself. Oprah gets preachier every year. She’s a cult leader, a self-proclaimed guru. And besides …
4. She’s Telling Us How to Live? Can’t keep the fat off? Can’t tie the knot? Girl, your life’s a mess.
5. Don’t You Say That About Oprah! Survived poverty and abuse, saved the book biz, uses TV for good, cares about her fans and looks fly! You go, Oprah.
It was not just the Chicago critics who came down on Oprah for presuming her viewers needed their lives changed. She took it on the chin from the Orlando Sentinel’s Hal Boedeker, who said her bubble-bath segment screamed for a parody on Saturday Night Live. He suggested an appropriate topic for her next show would be “Celebrity Run Amok” with a new theme song, “You’re So Vain,” which, he said, Oprah could sing to herself. “Her confident style has given way to arrogance.”
Perhaps the cruelest blow came when Wiley A. Hall III compared Louis Farrakhan to Oprah in the Afro-American Red Star. Hall wrote that with his “feel-good” Million Man March on Washington in 2000, the Nation of Islam leader was “trying to position himself as another Oprah Winfrey.… [Like Oprah] he’s become a master of the obvious, earnestly stated, passionately put.… With Oprah Winfrey and her new clone Louis Farrakhan, I have this strong sense that we’re being manipulated. I just can’t tell whether it’s for good or ill.” The kicker came the following week, when Hall reported that followers of Farrakhan, known for race-baiting and virulent anti-Semitism, felt he was being insulted to be compared to Oprah.
In The New York Times, the newspaper she cared most about,