[Mb-civic] Oprah's Grand Delusion - Richard Cohen - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Oprah's Grand Delusion

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, January 17, 2006; A17

Because she has led countless billions and billions of people to the 
promised land of books, because she preaches self-help and 
self-sufficiency and not least because she has shown that even a 
middle-aged person can keep weight off, I must tiptoe up to the amazing 
Oprah and merely whisper to her that in the case of James Frey, the liar 
whose memoir turns out to have a good deal of fiction alongside fact, 
she is not only wrong but deluded. What she needs is a session with Dr. 
Phil.

So important is Oprah Winfrey in our culture that it is not possible to 
type her name and not hear the rumbling of a mighty Wurlitzer, or 
imagine the many antechambers that undoubtedly precede an audience with 
the queen of England. Oprah is huge, powerful, akin to no one and 
nothing else. A mention of anything on her show will make a millionaire 
out of a pauper or, in the case of a writer such as the Frey the Fibber, 
a bestseller of undreamed proportions. The man became famous and rich on 
account of Oprah -- and, or so we all seem to believe, happy as well.

Frey's memoir, "A Million Little Pieces," is about his recovery from 
drug addiction. It is apparently a hell of a read, filled with gripping, 
cinematic details, some of which turn out not to be true. The Smoking 
Gun Web site found out, for instance, that Frey had not spent three 
months in jail, as he wrote, but maybe a couple of hours or so waiting 
for a friend to post bond. His account of his stay in a treatment 
facility is questionable, as is his involvement in a train-car collision 
that took the lives of two teenage girls. These are not, as Frey keeps 
claiming, the usual tussle we all have between memory and fact, but 
veering departures from fact into fiction. It is probably significant 
that he first tried to sell the book as a novel.

"A Million Little Pieces" was Oprah's selection for her book club, 
literally sending it off bookstore shelves and into the stratosphere: 
About 2 million sold after her endorsement. Recommending the book was 
one thing. No one expects Oprah to fact-check every book she urges her 
audience to read. Sticking by it is quite another matter. Even after the 
Smoking Gun smoked Frey, Oprah told Larry King that no matter what, the 
book still retained its "underlying message of redemption." Instead of 
getting a magisterial rebuke, Frey had been pardoned.

Here is where Dr. Phil steps in. He might tell his friend and mentor 
that there is no redemption without honesty. Treatment, as one expert 
told me, begins with "owning your life" and not embellishing it for the 
sake of others or yourself. It was one thing when Frey's tale was 
believed to be 100 percent true. Now that the lie has been exposed, the 
message can no longer be about redemption but about concoction -- the 
lies that addicts tell others, the ones they tell themselves.

As for Doubleday, the liar's publisher, it uttered all sorts of nonsense 
about different rules for memoirs but had no real explanation of how an 
hour or so in jail could be recollected as three months. In this vast 
corporation, there seemed to be no one who knew the difference between 
fact and fiction, truth and a lie. (Fiction packaged as fact is a lie.) 
Doubleday did not seem even a tad embarrassed that it had been 
snookered, that it had lent its considerable name and reputation -- 
built on the hard work of many an honest writer -- to a sham. What's 
more, it did not acknowledge that it must have suspected for some time 
that Frey had cooked his book. Back in 2003, for instance, the 
Minneapolis Star Tribune had questioned the book's factualness. (Some of 
"A Million Little Pieces" takes place in Minneapolis.) In effect, the 
story was dismissed -- go away, silly newspaper, there's too much money 
at stake.

This, I know, is not a revelation. Doubleday will chase a buck like any 
other company. As for Oprah, that is not quite the case. Whatever 
happens to Frey's book will not make her richer or poorer. But fame and 
wealth has lulled her into believing that she possesses something akin 
to papal infallibility. She finds herself incapable of seeing that she 
has been twice fooled -- once by Frey, a second time by herself.

Does Dr. Phil make house calls?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/16/AR2006011600912.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060117/35173ebe/attachment.htm