Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [9]
Oprah became so popular that WLS extended the morning show to an hour and renamed it in her honor. They also gave her a theme song titled “Everybody Loves Oprah,” which declared, “She’s mod, she’s hip, she’s really got a style.”
Dennis Swanson tried to capitalize on her popularity by putting her on the news. “He wanted to experiment with her as an anchor because her talk show was such a hit,” said Ed Kosowski, a former WLS producer. “She anchored the four P.M. news for a week. It didn’t work. It was a risk for the station and a gamble for Oprah. Swanson took her off immediately. She just didn’t have the journalistic chops. Absolutely no authority. She’s great at the girly-girl stuff, but she just can’t do news.”
Undeterred, Swanson sent his $200,000-a-year talk show host to Ethiopia, with anchors Mary Ann Childers and Dick Johnson, to report on Chicago’s project to ship grain to the African nation in the midst of its famine. A week before she left, Oprah had started a televised diet on Channel 7, to lose fifty pounds, having made a public bet with comedienne Joan Rivers on The Tonight Show. The timing seemed awkward to P.J. Bednarski, who commented on the image of an overfed correspondent interviewing victims of starvation. “Isn’t it a problem sending a personality who confesses to such a love for food to a country where there is so little?” he asked.
Oprah agreed. “You’re right. It’s sick, isn’t it?”
FOR A FEW DAYS after her sexual abuse show, she tried to placate management by not talking about rape and incest. But when she saw the show’s ratings, the letters that poured in, the calls to the WLS switchboard, and the reactions of women on the street, she knew she had given voice to a taboo torment that many women had suffered. She had found an issue that resonated with her predominantly female audience, so she pushed for more shows on sexual abuse. In the process, she fostered an image of herself as anti-male, because so many of her shows presented men as pigs. However, she became a heroine to women and a champion for children.
With that show, and her confession of what she had endured as a child, Oprah became more than a talk show host who entertained by trolling the raw side of the street. As someone who had suffered and survived and shared her pain, she became an inspiration for victims who felt defeated by adversity.
She was not the first to give voice to the sordid defilement of child abuse. She had been preceded by writers such as Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings), Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye), and Alice Walker (The Color Purple), but Oprah had the megaphone of television, and she used it to reach women shackled by the shame of what had been done to them as children. “What I think is that sexual abuse of children is more common than uncommon in this country,” she said in 1986. “You get five women in one room, and you can get three of them to admit it.” Her own confession, plus her subsequent shows exploring the devastation of sexual molestation, became the strongest force in society to help women begin to heal and recover their lives.
“Incest Victims” (12/5/85)
Serial killer John Wayne Gacy (2/11/86)
“Men Who Rape and Treatment for Rapists” (9/23/86)
“Sexual Abuse in Families” (11/10/86)
The Lisa Steinberg death (2/87)
“Men Who Have Been Raped” (11/87)
Parents whose children have been hurt by babysitters (1988)
Women who have borne children by their own fathers (1988)
“I Want My Abused Kids Back” (1988)
Rape and rape victims (11/7/88)
“In Search of Missing Children” (8/14/89)
“Rapists” (8/23/89)
“Clergy Abuse” (9/14/89)
“ ‘She Asked for It’ … The Rape Decision” (10/17/89)
“Date Rape” (12/7/89)
Truddi Chase, victim of multiple personality disorder, discusses her sexual abuse (8/10/90)