Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [241]
“My job was to make people, or allow people, to be introduced to Obama who might not have been at the time,” she said. “I wanted him elected, and I think I did that.”
Afterword
I REMEMBER Oprah standing in the control room watching Phil Donahue toward the end of his run and shaking her head,” recalled a former Harpo employee. “She said, ‘If I ever stay that long, kick my ass out of here.’ Of course, that’ll never happen because she’ll never give up her show. She can’t … she needs to be on television. It’s her oxygen.”
Most people assumed that it would take a wrecking crew with tasers and stun guns to get Oprah to retire, but on November 20, 2009, she announced she was stopping her show after twenty-five years—when her contract expired in September 2011.
“This show has been my life,” she told her viewers with trembling lips, “and I love it enough to know when it’s time to say goodbye.”
Those words sent an “Oh, my God” shudder across the country and triggered Code Orange distress throughout the television industry. Oprah’s departure from four o’clock in the afternoon would crater a hole in daytime broadcasting and deprive local stations, especially those owned and operated by ABC, of a gigantic ratings lead-in to their evening news hours. The financial ramifications were potentially enormous.
From the next day’s headlines it seemed as if Chicken Little was right: the sky had fallen. Oprah’s announcement made the front pages of most newspapers, the cover of People, and the evening news broadcasts, and prompted a tidal wave of commentary, most of which praised her for hanging up her gloves before she risked getting knocked out by dwindling network audiences and flaccid ratings.
Alessandra Stanley applauded her in The New York Times for practicing “The Fine Art of Quitting While She’s Ahead,” and Gail Collins wrote a column about “Putting the Fond in Farewell.” The Los Angeles Times mourned “Afternoons Without Oprah,” and The Wall Street Journal wondered what her departure would mean for the economic future of Chicago.
Oprah said she planned to concentrate on OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network) in partnership with Discovery Communications. The debut of OWN, announced in 2008, was originally scheduled for 2009. Now it will be sometime in 2011. Once launched, Oprah’s network will replace the Discovery Health Channel, which is available in 74 million homes. The Oprah Winfrey Show, in 2008–2009, before the nation switched to a digital system, reached approximately 110 million homes. In its current incarnation, the show is watched by around 7 million people each day. There is little doubt that switching to OWN will dramatically lower her viewership.
OWN is based in Los Angeles, and soon after her announcement, Oprah was quoted as saying she wanted to divest her real estate in Chicago “as soon as possible,” adding, “Why would anyone stay in Chicago? It’s freezing here, and I have a mansion in Montecito that I haven’t been able to enjoy.”
While the national media mourned the departure of daytime’s Goliath, the Davids of Chicago grabbed their slingshots. “[H]er announcement spurs a question: Does it matter?” asked the Tribune’s Rick Kogan. “Over the years she has become, with some justification, increasingly isolated, distrustful of all but a close circle of friends and associates, and remote …” With tongue in cheek, the Trib’s media critic, Phil Rosenthal, told readers: “Deal with it however you see fit. Maybe ask yourself: What would Oprah do? Then call your best friend Gayle to commiserate.”
Chicago’s mayor, Richard Daley, was furious at the tone taken by the city’s media and blamed them for driving Oprah out of town. At her request, he had closed part of