Ever since Oprah Winfrey endorsed Barack Obama for President a year ago, there’s been a tendency in the media to yoke their fortunes. They’re both African American Chicagoans, from humble backgrounds, with cross-racial appeal. They’re charismatic leaders, inspiring passionate—to their critics, cultish—followings with messages of empowerment and change. And their names both start with O! We’re simple folk, we in the press.
So after the 2007-08 ratings came out, showing Oprah’s talk show down by 7 percent on the year, analysts and pundits assumed the endorsement did it. It was a tempting theory, because it ties into so many of the media’s go-to memes this election: gender (did female viewers feel Oprah betrayed Hillary?), race (does this mean she, and thus Obama, can’t transcend racial divisions after all?) and pop politics (was she being punished for celebrity hubris?).
There was some evidence: a Gallup poll after the Obama endorsement showed that Oprah’s favorable rating dropped from 74 to 66 percent. But Oprah’s ratings, it turns out, have been falling for the past three years—from roughly 9 million viewers to 7.3 million—as has the circulation of her magazine. She endorsed Obama last year. If her audience is that psychic, we should be polling them on when the next San Andreas quake will hit.
But if the endorsement wasn’t the cause of Oprah’s slide, it may be a symptom of a bigger problem that is less political than—in a way—religious.
Oprah is perhaps the closest thing America has to a secular religious figure (“She was like the pope,” a professor told the New York Times) or even, let’s be honest, a goddess. She inspired worship and devotion. She guided her flock spiritually. She anointed disciples (Rachael Ray, Dr. Phil) and sent them out into the world.
The secret to Oprah the goddess was how deftly she balanced her New Testament and Old Testament sides. The friendly New Testament Oprah was benevolent and beneficient, bestowing gifts to the multitudes; in her case Pontiacs, designer shoes and other Oprah’s Favorite Things rather than loaves and fishes. She loved you unconditionally and boosted your self-esteem. She helped you help yourself. But there was a little Old Testament Oprah too: she passed judgment, advocated causes, told you you needed to get right.
In the past few years, however, coinciding roughly with her ratings slump, Pentateuch Oprah has seemed to get the upper hand. Oprah has always reinvented herself every now and then—tabloid Oprah, literary Oprah, confessional Oprah. And her latest incarnation has become increasingly bossy and inclined to issue stone-tablet commandments.
There was, of course, the legendary 2006 episode in which Oprah unleashed the fiery wrath of Heaven on mendacious memoirist James Frey after his fabrications tarnished her book club. Her New Age spirituality—long an element of her program—has become more prominent and insistent, as she pushed books by Eckhart Tolle, Marianne Williamson and Rhonda Byrne. She lectured Hermes for not opening a Paris store late for her, and her nobly-intended South African girls’ school was rocked by sex-abuse charges. Oh, and she decided to go on a three-week vegan cleansing diet! You should do it too! It won’t be too much work for your personal chef!
The Obama endorsement, then, may not have changed people’s perception of Oprah so much as it was yet another item on a ever-growing to-do list handed down from Mount Winfrey. Of course, there are plenty of viewers who want that guidance, who value and admire Oprah as a mentor. But others see her as an entertainer/character/girlfriend, and simply take the spirituality and crusades as part of the package. Recently, Oprah touted a rerun of her show’s investigation of cruelty at puppy mills—a worthy topic, sure—as “our most talked-about show of the year.” Maybe, but as measured by Internet buzz-tracking site Technorati, that title may properly belong not to the puppy-mill episode but to her interview with the “pregnant man,” a transgender male bearing a child in his remaining female reproductive organs. In other words, there may be some disconnect between what Oprah thinks her show is about and what her fans do.
This, I suppose, is where the talk-show-as-politics metaphor kicks back in. Oprah’s challenge—which she has mastered for decades and may yet master again—is like a politician’s. You need to lead your people while also being led by them. This dynamic isn’t unique to her endorsee Obama, but political observers have noted how his campaign balances people power—the social networking, the “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”—with centralized message control.
Likewise with Oprah, the key to bringing her ratings back up may be returning to her show’s theme that people need improvement, but that they, not Oprah, are the final key to their own self-perfection. People love it when you give them Pontiacs. But they still want to do the driving themselves.