WHY OPRAH WINFREY MATTERS

The first time I ever became aware of the word “Oprah” I was in mid-flight in 1986, reading People Magazine. Someone was quoted, outrageously predicting that Oprah Winfrey, the dynamo Chicago talk show host who was about to go national, was going to give Phil Donahue a run for his money. I was a die hard Phil Donahue devotee, so the idea of anyone outdoing him in the talk show genre was unfathomable to me. Donahue had dominated the morning airwaves for 15 years by then, tackling subjects as edgy as white supremacy, the death penalty and gay rights -- way before there was anything remotely acceptable about that. Sisters, strippers and stars had chatted live with Phil, the likable prematurely gray, Irish Catholic everyman. We loved us some Phil here in America.

But the dynamo that is Oprah did indeed end up giving our Phil a run for his money. After 29 years, Phil (left) retired, but by this time Oprah was fully immersed in the viewing public’s consciousness. At first, she seemed to be carrying on the predictable “pregnant nuns who smoke and drink” variety of talk show topics. It was entertaining, if not groundbreaking, but there was something eminently watchable about Oprah. She was eternally smiling, strong of voice and highly relatable. She was very much her own person and compelling to watch. You must understand that talk shows in the mid to late 20th century were usually along the lines of Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin or Johnny Carson. Lots of laughs, highly entertaining and light chat. Donahue invented the topical, audience participation talk show format. Oprah carried it forward.

Donahue was a white man in a white guy’s America. But Oprah was an overweight, overdressed, over coiffed black woman, on national television in white America. If her early shows were sometimes mundane in topic, she never was. She broke new ground simply by being on daily television. It took her several years to truly understand the power that came with her position on TV, and how to use it to make some changes in the world.

When I was a kid, I was repeatedly told I had good “verbal skills.” I wondered what that would do for me in the world. By the time I found Donahue, I realized one could build a whole career using his voice to address issues that mattered. But Oprah built an entire empire using words as the foundation. She gave voice to people who needed to be heard for the greater good. Of all the voices she brought forth, the one that really mattered the most to me was that of Mattie Stepanek, a young boy with Muscular Dystrophy and wisdom way beyond his tender years. Mattie, even when his age was still in single digits, was a poet, a best-selling published author, a public speaker, an ambassador for Muscular Dystrophy Association and an inspiration to many people. Mattie and Oprah became fast friends – an inspirational power couple, if you will. When Mattie died at 13, Oprah spoke at his funeral, as did President Jimmy Carter. Oprah’s interviews are proprietary material, so I can’t show them here, but here is a short tribute video Oprah did after Mattie died:

Randy Plauch was another voice Oprah amplified for the masses. Plauch was a computer science professor at Carnegie Melon University. In his 40s, Plausch was stricken with pancreatic cancer. Told by his doctors that his medical options were exhausted, Plausch, the married father of two small children decided to live a lot until the end. He became widely known for “The Last Lecture.” The real title of the speech was “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” Plausch reinforced my belief in the true power of words. His speech is riveting. On Oprah’s show, he delivered a abbreviated version. Please watch:
Voices like Plausch’s need wide distribution. That is what Oprah did for us. If Plausch’s words have meaning for you, you can watch the entire speech by clicking here.

There were so many others whose own life experiences taught us how to appreciate or improve our individual lives. There was the mother who lost all of her limbs to a flesh-eating bacteria, and decided to rise above it and just keep on keeping on. There was a 17-year-old boy who spent his early childhood encased in wire and locked in a closet, who told us the important thing to remember is to do good for others every day. Sounds simplistic? Not from somebody who grew up in a closet. I remember a guest who survived a plane crash in which the other passengers died. He was trapped in his seat so he actually watched people burn and die. He said he watched their “auras” leave their bodies. Some, he said, were brighter than others. He said what he learned was to live a good life, so that when his aura left his body it was as bright as possible. Oprah gave all of them, and thousands of others, a chance to use their voice to teach and inspire us.

Everybody’s voice counts. But many times when Oprah spoke, I was compelled to really listen. Over the years she said things like, “Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.” She told us, “Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity.” And this: “Surround yourself with only people who are going to lift you higher.” And one of the most important things I learned from Oprah Winfrey: “"When you undervalue what you do, the world will undervalue who you are."

We live in a cynical, skeptical culture. We often tend to resort to sarcasm rather than clearly communicate what we feel. So, many people would hear words from Oprah and dismiss them as just the ramblings of a talk show host. Their loss, I’d say. What makes Oprah valuable to the rest of us is her imperfections, her recognition of her own personal challenges, and the lessons she has taken away from all of it. Those lessons she has translated into teachings for us. You don’t have to agree with her when she says, “"Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different," but you have to admit it sure makes you think. Oprah makes us think sometimes. Count the people who truly make you think – I bet you can do so on one hand and have fingers left over.

In the coming weeks, as we count down to the end of the Oprah Winfrey Show, you will read all kinds of tributes, reviews, editorial valentines, etc. They’ll tell you how much they are going to miss her on daytime TV. Not me. Instead I am acting on one of the lessons she offered. Over the years, Oprah encouraged us to live in the moment, be the best we could be, so that the next moment(s) would be even better. That is what she is doing. At 57, hopefully she still has many productive years to expand on what she started with the talk show. She redefined broadcasting, making it into something it had never been. The important thing is that she did it, not that she is ending it.

In Time Magazine’s 2010 Time 100,none other than Phil Donahue had this to say to Oprah Winfrey: “…you leave a legacy of responsible TV stewardship, a program that brought light to dark places and made us laugh, often at ourselves.” He also called her a “once in a century woman.” I agree. Thank you, Oprah. You matter.

But What Will We Do at 4PM?

It’s the same old boy meets girl story. Okay, maybe it’s not. Wait. It’s more like middle-aged white Jewish guy doesn’t meet black billionaire media tycoon, but follows her career from afar. The guy would be me, and the tycoon would be our holy St. Oprah of Chicago.

Around 1983, I was on a plane reading PEOPLE magazine, when I came across a story about a Chicago talk show hostess (that’s what they called female talk show hosts in those days). There were photos of her – extremely overweight, too much makeup, too much hair, huge, strangely compelling smile. Could she be the next Phil Donahue, the writer wondered? Nah, I thought. Nobody can out-Phil Phil Donahue. At the time, I was a Donahue fanatic, always going on about how Phil had the best gig in the universe. I was so hooked on Phil that a few years earlier, when I worked at a St. Louis TV station, I used to lock my office door at 10AM so that I could watch his show, even though there was a hard and fast rule that employees were never to switch the channel from our own KPLR-TV, Channel 11 – “The Ones to Watch.” Get it? 11, the “ones” to watch. Oy.

But Phil(below, left) had invented a genre that caused the American public to switch its collective allegiance from soap operas to his talk show. One day he would have a world leader on his stage, and the next day he would have male strippers. Ku Klux Klan-ers, motion picture legends, crooked politicians, gay activists, punk rockers, atheists, life-changing scientists – if you can think of a category of human being, you saw it on Phil, sometime between 1974 and 1996, the years his syndicated program aired first from Chicago and later from New York.

As it happened, Oprah could and indeed did become “the next Phil Donahue.” Oprah took Phil’s concept, beginning with her hosting gig on AM Chicago (right), and nursed it along until it evolved into something much broader than Donahue had ever envisioned. One could safely say Oprah invented the concept of media convergence. Today, convergence is a term that is tossed around to describe various media working in harmony to convey information to a mass audience. It can be as simple as Oprah starting a book club, or as technologically advanced as Oprah using Skype, contemporary software that allows ordinary viewers to communicate remotely (sometimes from their own kitchens) in real time with Oprah, in front of a live audience. Today, Oprah’s convergence methodology extends to her “Oprah Radio,” her diverse collection of programming on XM satellite radio. It even reaches out to movie audiences, most recently through her collaboration with movie maker Tyler Perry on the film Precious. “O,” the magazine is celebrating its 10th year in print, in conjunction with the Heart Corporation. Oprah is media convergence, defined.

The evolution of Oprah is something to behold, and a lesson in “anything is possible.” Oprah was born to a coal miner and house maid in a rural Mississippi town with a population even today that doesn’t reach 8,000. If legend is accurate, Oprah was the result of a single sexual encounter between her parents. For the four of you out there who haven’t heard the story, you can Google her and read all about it, but the highlights are extreme poverty, sexual molestation, the ability to read before age three, a pregnancy at age 14 that resulted in a still birth, and an inner drive that allowed her to achieve more than her early life story would have portended. As for the molestation part, Oprah revealed over the years that she was abused by a cousin, an uncle and a family acquaintance, beginning at age nine.

Her early story is all about over-achieving. By her senior year in high school she was already working in TV news. The obvious progression, as the years added up, was to put her on air as a newscaster,(left) but Oprah could not manage the requisite poker face. If a story was funny, she looked straight in the camera and laughed that hearty Oprah laugh we know so well now. If a story was sad, her empathy fairly spilled over the airwaves, sometimes even resulting in tears. It was clear Oprah was not to be Walter Cronkite. By 1984 she had a local Chicago morning talk show. By 1986 she was nationally syndicated. The rest we’ve been watching for 25 years.

Well…almost 25 years. Recently, Oprah revealed that 25 would mark her sterling silver transition from the daytime talk arena into ownership of her own network, The Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN). It is likely Oprah will do for cable all that she did for all other media. Just as traditional network news traces its most important paradigm shift to the day John F. Kennedy was killed, cable TV will probably mark its true ascent to the moment Oprah chose cable over network syndication.

Why does it matter to you? Does it even matter? It does. It should. Oprah Winfrey is living proof that one human being can make a positive difference in the lives of millions of others. Whether it is a post-Katrina Louisiana housing development built with Oprah dollars, or a South African school for girls built with Oprah’s sheer will and determination, it matters. Everything Oprah has done in these 25 years has been geared toward enabling individuals to become their “best selves,” as she terms it. She has given a voice to individuals who otherwise may have remained involuntarily silent. She has offered a platform for individuals who could substantively contribute to the mix of ideas – individuals who had previously been unable to find the widest audience. Consider Mattie Stepanek, the self-titled “poet and peacemaker,” who suffered from a rare form of muscular dystrophy that finally claimed his life. Mattie’s words had already reached many people by the time Oprah met him, but she enabled him to reach tens of millions more. Watch: After this quarter century of everything Oprah, it is not really about whether you find her appealing or whether you even watch her show. It is about recognizing excellence; separating the glitz and glamour from the real and the important. Oprah’s steady emergence was the visual representation of the intersection of the civil rights movement and television’s grasp on popular culture. When she finally got to interview her lifelong heroes (Barbara Walters, Mary Tyler Moore, Sidney Poitier) we all got to experience the same full circle moments. Since Oprah could beat the odds she overcame, maybe we can too. If Oprah can come outside of herself and dedicate her best energy to enriching the lives of those who need it the most, maybe that can be a catalyst for us to do so, as well. Oprah has high standards in an era when standards have all but disappeared. There is a critical message in there somewhere for us all.

Oprah has given us a 23-month notice that she’s closing down The Oprah Winfrey Show. That’s plenty of time for us to recognize what she brought to the cultural table, and to understand how she found a way to use media to enrich all of our lives.

And selfishly, here’s my favorite part of Oprah’s impending departure – her last broadcast is scheduled for September 9, 2011 – my birthday!