Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [214]
Mr. Chavez was one of the few guests to get out of Harpo without having to sign a confidentiality agreement. Most who appear on Oprah’s show are sworn to secrecy, but they are so grateful to be there that they willingly sign away their rights. “My publisher told me the difference between Oprah and other shows is the difference between a lightning bug and the sun,” said a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, too scared to be quoted by name. “So, of course, I want to be in the sun.”
Swallowing professional reservations, most writers sign Oprah’s binding agreements, but one man objected on principle. “I just couldn’t do it,” said Chris Rose, a prizewinning columnist for New Orleans’s Times-Picayune. “It struck me as wrong and ran counter to everything that I believe as a writer and a journalist and a human being.”
Rose had written moving columns about the harrowing depression he suffered in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. His columns were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and later published in a book titled 1 Dead in Attic. On the second anniversary of the hurricane, he was contacted by Oprah’s show to discuss post-traumatic stress disorders among Katrina survivors. “They wanted my expertise, not as a book writer or even a newspaper columnist, but as the city’s most famously depressed resident, by virtue of my columns about battling the disease,” he said. “Yet they would not allow me to mention my book or even show a copy of it on the air, although the subject of their show and my book was the mental health crisis in New Orleans. At the end of a long and excruciating day—ten hours—revisiting the emotional wreckage of the hurricane, Oprah’s producer pulled out a sheet of paper and said I had to sign it.… Now, I was willing to give her the right to use my name, my image, my story, even footage of my youngest child, but I could not give her the right to void my experience for the last ten hours.… I explained that writing is my life and writing about my experience is what I do for a living.
“ ‘If you don’t sign, we don’t run the segment,’ ” the producer said.
“They had just sucked out of me my inner darkness and were exposing my personal struggles to the entire country,” Rose recalled. “As exhausted as I was I was not going to cave in to this kind of brinksmanship.” The producer panicked, and for the next three hours Rose was peppered with calls from various producers up the chain of Oprah’s command, insisting that he sign the confidentiality agreement, and threatening to cut his segment if he didn’t.
“Trust us,” they said. Rose held firm. That night he wrote a column about the experience of dealing with Oprah and her producers, which was posted on the newspaper’s website.
“The next morning I found out what it meant to ‘go viral,’ ” he said. “I had stuck my hand into a hornet’s nest of anti-Oprah sentiment on the Internet that pushed my book from number eleven thousand on Amazon to number eighteen by the end of the day and then on to The New York Times bestseller list. I was stunned because I had always considered Oprah to be an engine for good.… I had no idea there were negative feelings about her and her confidentiality agreements out there, but I received calls and emails from writers all over the country saying they were going to buy my book that day to send her a message.… The irony is that my segment did run on Oprah [“Special Report: Katrina—What Will It Take to Recover?”] and my book was posted on her website—at least for a while. But I guess I go down as the guy whose book became a bestseller for not having been seen on The Oprah Winfrey Show.”
Harpo producers consistently presented shows with quality production values—arresting visuals, fast-paced segments, and exclusive interviews tailored to a female audience looking for entertainment, diversion, and