Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [229]
Neither objection fazed Oprah. Needing the approval and good opinion of others, she preferred joining the establishment to jabbing it, and the establishment view then was in support of invading Iraq. Temperamentally, Oprah would have been uncomfortable putting herself in the minority by questioning the president’s policies, especially in the wake of 9/11, when any kind of dissent was looked upon as unpatriotic. Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly had announced, “I will call those who publicly criticize their country in a time of military crisis … bad Americans.” Later Oprah presented a two-part program, “Should the U.S. Attack Iraq?” on February 6 and 7, 2003, and claimed she received hate mail, calling her “the N word” and telling her “to go back to Africa” because she was not pro-war enough. That was her last show on the subject. The United States invaded Iraq on March 30, 2003.
Four years later, Bill Moyers Journal produced a compelling ninety-minute program on PBS titled “Buying the War,” which showed how the mainstream media had abandoned their role as watchdogs and became lapdogs for a failed policy that cost thousands of American and Iraqi lives. Moyers, who received an Emmy for his documentary, included Oprah in his condemnation of the media.
At the time she seemed to be cheerleading for the Bush administration, Oprah had attracted numerous complaints to the Federal Communications Commission for airing explicit sexual material during hours when children watched television. Particularly at issue was a show titled “Is Your Child Living a Double Life?” in which Oprah and her guests spoke graphically about the sexual slang and sexual acts of teenagers. “If your child said they had their salad tossed … would you know what they meant?” she asked viewers. She then provided the graphic and salacious definitions of “tossed salad,” “outercourse,” “booty call,” and “rainbow parties,” which prompted a barrage of complaints to the FCC. Shock jock Howard Stern tried to air her remarks on his radio show the next day, but his New York station manager bleeped them for obscene and indecent language. “But it’s Oprah,” protested Stern, who had been fined almost $2 million by the FCC for using similar language. Without friends in high places, he felt that he was being held to a double standard.
One of the FCC complainants against Oprah agreed. “The very day that Howard Stern was fined, Oprah broadcast sexual and excretory material that was even more explicit,” wrote Jeff Jarvis, the former television critic of TV Guide. “I’ve complained and so have many others. But you can bet she won’t be fined.…” Claiming that Oprah had done her show on teen sex just to get the subject of sex on the air, Jarvis called her a hypocrite. “Oprah: You can’t act as if you don’t bear considerable responsibility for this. You brought sex to afternoon TV. Now I don’t think you should be fined for that and I don’t think you should be taken off the air for that: I just don’t watch you. But you’re doing nothing different from Howard Stern—except getting away with it. So cut your holier-than-thou disapproval of sex on the rest of TV. You are the Queen of Trash.”
The Santa Barbara News-Press, which served the area where Oprah’s mansion in Montecito was located, also noted the hypocrisy. “What parents want their kids to come home from school, run to turn on Oprah and be subjected to that stuff?” wrote Scott Steepleton, assistant metro editor. “The time has come for the FCC to stop applying the law in such an arbitrary fashion. If it’s crude, it’s crude—no matter whose show it’s on.” Yet the FCC ruled in 2006 that Oprah’s show on teenage sex was not indecent because the explicit language was not used to shock.
One can only wonder if the FCC was out of order during the February sweeps of 2006 when Oprah did a show titled “Women Who Use Sex to Find Love.” She interviewed a woman, given the fictitious name of Jennifer, who claimed to have had sex with ninety men, keeping an ongoing list and video diary of her one-night stands. Oprah