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How Oprah Winfrey Helped Create Our Irrational, Pseudoscientific Fantasyland
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- dba7dba 9y agoI had no idea about some of the connections brought up in the article. All I had to say was lol. She is opposite of Trump but still share same attributes: outsider from DC, rich, and media savvy. It's not really her fault that she took off with her unscientific stories. There definitely was an audience ready for it. People usually hear what they want to hear. Or so I'm told. Edit
- labster 9y ago> She is a kid of opposite of Trump in a way. Outsider. Rich. Media savvy. What? Those are all traits they have in common. Not really opposites. Do you mean she's a liberal counterpart to Trump?
- 627467 9y agoYes, Oprah is a mirror version of Trump: take a trait, find its left-right, up-down, and you can place both in opposite ends of the spectrum. "Progressivism" became so stale that it allowed Trump to become elected, and with Oprah we would see "progressivism" struggle to pull its own Trump card in desperation.
- txsh 9y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEPs17_AkTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEPs17_AkTI
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y agoYeah, I agree, it's not really a fraudster's fault that people fall for their lies. If people are prone to fall for fraud, how could it be the responsibility of others to not abuse that susceptibility?
- programmer_dude 9y agoThis is not something you can fix overnight. I am afraid the US has begun its downward spiral into the gutter already. It will be very difficult to extricate yourselves now. I apologise for the harsh words but I live in one such democratic gutter already and am speaking from experience.
- imron 9y agoDave Rubin has a good take on a potential presidential run by Oprah: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41d9DFsfmrA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41d9DFsfmrA
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoHe makes some great points. The issues no longer matters for US politicians. All that matters is their cult of personality building around politicians.
- imron 9y agoIt's his second point that I found the most concerning - the increasing trend of governing by executive order, coupled with the cult of the personality is a recipe for disaster.
- thisisit 9y agoAs an outsider I have always found it interesting Oprah has a huge gathering from her talk shows. While there are stories outlining her rise, I wanted to see some of her "best" interviews, especially during her early years. But Google or YT have not been very helpful.
- ebbv 9y agoShe's not a good interviewer. Her success has nothing to do with any kind of interviewing skill, it has to do with choosing hot button issues and topics that her audience find compelling. That's it. That's why there's so much woo-woo on her show over the years, and so many total fluff interviews, and so much panic about child safety. Because it was a daytime show aimed at housewives.
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- downrightmike 9y agoHer shows over the years have largely been about reaffirming people's delusional beliefs for headlines. But that's what gets the viewers.
- Torgo 9y agoIn her early years, her show was more like a salacious talk show, like Jerry Springer.
- dragonwriter 9y agoOprah is less of an interviewer than a cooperative promoter for those selling feel-good narratives, social panic, and (often health-related) woo. The first is probably mostly harmless, the second and third decidedly not.
- empath75 9y agoGuys, can we just, as a society, agree not to elect any more celebrities to public office. I just want my next president to be boring. Just some dweeby guy/gal in a suit who isn’t part of some political dynasty, that went to school, studied hard and got a law degree, and served for a few years in a relevant public office, like governor or senator. You know like a normal politician. Or what used to be one. The American political system for all its faults, is pretty good and maybe we should like try and do something normal instead of throwing a tantrum because the last guy tried to fix health insurance.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoI don't even think should expect a president to have a law degree. Many east asian countries and germany have engineering phd's as their leader.
- bluthru 9y ago>The American political system for all its faults, is pretty good It's actually fucking atrocious: 2 parties, and you depend on the money of the elite to become elected. If our system was decent, people wouldn't have looked towards Trump to reject it. We voted for Democrats in 2008 to fix healthcare, and the public option was denied by Lieberman and Ben Nelson (former insurance executive).
- tomlock 9y agoSince Ronald Reagan there's been a precedent set that it isn't a bad thing for conservatives to have previously been in showbiz. Same is definitely true on the "other" side. I honestly would prefer to see some salt-of-the-earth person not involved in politics elected to office ala Ricky Muir in Australia (where I'm from). I don't necessarily think lack of political experience is a bad thing for a politician to have. Many of the positions which hold the requisite political knowledge and support elected officials are hired, not elected.
- sjg007 9y agoIt helps to be charismatic, which celebrities have in spades. And you have to be attractive. I’d rather there be intelligent debate rather than overgeneralized tweets. Twitter is toxic. Even here on hacker news we can’t have lively debate. Critical thinking is going extinct. And nobody cares.
- wordToDaBird 9y agoWhy is this on HN?
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoridiculously how Americans are agitating for Oprah as the best chance to save us from Trump...just goes to show the sad state of affairs in US. Oprah and Trump are two sides of the same coin.
- oceanghost 9y agoThe American media in no way represents the American public.
- cmurf 9y agoBased on what data? Most of the American media is privately owned, and for-profit. Someone's paying for that. If it's not the American public, who is?
- oceanghost 9y agoYou just answered your own question.
- tdb7893 9y agoThe much more common sentiment among my liberal friends is that after Trump they want someone who knows what the hell they are doing and Oprah is not that person. Maybe it's just the liberals I know but they have so far all been hostile to her running.
- Lazare 9y agoFingers crossed, but then again, all the conservatives I know detested Trump too, and yet here we are. If the field is fractured, a surprisingly small group of fans can push a highly disliked candidate to the top of the heap, and once that happens, the inexorable logic of the electoral system can make it difficult to reverse. (I'm thinking here of Trump, of course, but Clinton is almost as good an example.)
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- everdev 9y agoI'm no fan of Oprah or even know her politics but it's funny that when someone says "I'm considering a run for President" you can expect a queue of negative news articles. Makes me wonder if they're sponsored by political opponents. I find it hard to believe that Slate had this story in the queue and that her announcement was simply a coincidence. Or does the news media simply want to ride the Oprah for President wave?
- akkat 9y agoIt is possible that it is simply an attack peace but I don't think so. Opera is now a person of greater interest. That means that more people are likely to read an article about her. Therefore news sites want to write things about her.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> more people are likely to read an article about her. Therefore news sites want to write things about her. This is what journalism is supposed to do. Oprah switched channels from talk show host to potential politician. I want good journalists to inform me on her.
- dmoy 9y agoIf it's Oprah vs Trump 2020, I feel like we're rapidly approaching Fahrenheit 451 crazyland politics (just specifically the politicians, nothing else about the book).
- ixtli 9y agoI would say that one very important mitigating factor is that Oprah has clearly demonstrated that she's capable of delegating tasks in order to achieve something larger than what would otherwise be possible with the force of her own personality. This is a material and important skill in a leader. People's view of trump as a success at building businesses by any reasonable measure is absurd but Oprah has been wildly successful by many metrics the right has consistently agitated for in their leaders. To be clear I'm a pretty staunch socialist so I find little solace in the idea that she could be president, but I also think it's not quite right to say that they are steps down the same path: if I had to make this sort of a metaphor it would be that Trump yields Fahrenheit 451 and Oprah yields a cyberpunk dystopia something akin to Blade Runner.
- rgbrenner 9y agoPeople's view of trump as a success at building businesses by any reasonable measure is absurd but Oprah has been wildly successful Forbes says Oprah is worth $2.8B.. and Trump is worth $3.1B. Oprah is 63; Trump is 71... so they've had about the same amount of time. By what reasoning is one a failure and the other wildly successful?
- DashRattlesnake 9y agoTrump started out by inheriting his money, and he would have made much more by investing it in an index fund than he has by playing businessman.
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- qubex 9y agoTo everybody considering this a good thing (and even to those considering this a bad thing), I suggest reading Neil Postman's excellent cautionary analysis Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985 and subsequent revisions): basically he predicted that a 24-hour news cycle and bombastic personalities with debates framed in terms of fifteen-second sound-bites would result in politics becoming nothing more than a form of entertainment, and that citizens would begin to respond to it as such. That was with few-to-many traditional mass-media; with social media the tendency has become (counterintuitively) if anything even more heightened. It's a horrific state of affairs. Anyway, it’s a book I first read in 1998 and though written in the Regan years struck me as being unbelievably pertinent even to the world when I first read it, let alone now. I remember that right after the Columbine mass-shooting in 1999 my best friend and I were sitting in his bedroom. We were late teenagers (18), expatriates living in Italy, getting our “international” news from the very first online news sources such as cnn.com and the bbc website. George W. Bush was clearly on track to become the Republican candidate and was equally clearly under the thumb of the NRA. I remember muttering that if the Democrats had any sense they'd deploy against him with a candidate with mass-market appeal... “Oprah Winfrey or Jerry Springer, and sod the consequences”. My friend, wise beyond his years, presciently remarked “Jerry Springer I shan't deign with a response, but Oprah Winfrey and the touchy-feely feel-good stuff of folks like Robin Williams is all that is bad about what is good about America... the day a party will nominate one of those to run as their candidate you'll know it's all over, the experiment of the Founding Fathers will have gone down the drain, it'll be the end of everything because the system will have the means but no incentive to recover”. Those words have haunted me ever since. I reminded him of that grim pronouncement of his just the other day (coincidentally the day Oprah gave that speech was also the exact same day he became a father) and he just looked at me with tired eyes that glasses over with sadness.
- koonsolo 9y agoI have a nice example on how people will always choose celebrities over good politicians. In Belgium, there is this political party NVA, who used to say that politicians shouldn't appear in entertainment programs. This party also lived by it. They only appeared in political debates. Back then that party was small. At the time, there was this popular politician Steve Stevaert, of an opposing (big) party. He always appeared at TV entertainment shows, and people loved him. They thought he was a very sympathetic. People voted for him because they probably felt close to him. NVA saw that their (in my eyes politically correct) strategy wasn't working. So one of their major politicians, Bart De Wever, started to appear in entertainment shows. Now this guy had a hidden talent: he could make really funny dry jokes, and people loved him for that. Because of his entertainment value, all kinds of shows invited him. Guess what, that political party became huge, one of the biggest in Belgium. People voted for him. So unless there is a law that forbids politicians to appear in entertainment shows, I guess people will vote for the ones who appear in the popular media. Sad but true.