The Hidden Power of Oprah Winfrey - Research Paper Example

The Hidden Power of Oprah Winfrey If the saying, “behind every powerful man is a woman” is true, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that behind one of themost powerful meBarackn in the world is Oprah Winfrey. Oprah Winfrey has quite often been depicted by the media as being the most influential woman in America. She has been named in Time magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people on the planet six times, which is more times than any other individual has managed. Her endorsements have increased sales of a whole galaxy of products ranging from books to skin creams. Her support may well have decided the next ‘most powerful man in the world’, American President-elect Barack Obama. In this paper I have attempted to show Winfrey’s gargantuan influence on popular culture- the O effect- and the reasons for her success. The American Dream has often been defined as America’s promise of success and great wealth to anyone who is willing to work hard enough for it, regardless of their circumstances or the way they started out in life. If anyone can claim that her life epitomizes the American Dream, it is Oprah Winfrey. From her extremely humble origins, a tumultuous childhood and an adolescence filled with abuse, Winfrey has evolved into, arguably the most widely respected television personality at the helm of a multibillion media empire. Winfrey is an inductee into the Academy of Achievement, which has chronicled her life. We’ll now turn our attention to her own personal story, as documented on the Web profile at http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/win0bio-1 under editor Hugh Esten. Oprah Winfrey was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi in 1954 and spent her early childhood on her grandmother’s farm. At the age of three, she went to live with her mother in Milwaukee. Winfrey has claimed on her show that around this time she was repeatedly sexually molested by an uncle, a cousin and friends of the family. As a young teenager, she ran away, spending some time in a juvenile detention centre. This was a rough phase for her, as she became pregnant when she was just 14 years old and her son died shortly after birth. Finally, she went to Nashville to live with Vernon Winfrey, her strict, disciplinarian father. With her father, she was subject to a midnight curfew and required to read a book and write a report on it every week. The Esten-edited profile goes on to say that at 17, Winfrey made her first foray into broadcasting when she took a job at WVOL radio in Nashville. In two years, she crossed over into television as a co-anchor with WTVF-TV. She showed how truly ambitious she was by majoring in Speech Communications and Performing Arts at Tennessee State University at the same time as she did her first TV work. 1976 found her in Baltimore, co-anchoring the news at WJZ-TV. In 1978, while still doing the news, she found her calling as the co-host of the talk show People Are Talking. Oprah Winfrey’s breakthrough came in January 1984 when she took over the ratings-challenged AM Chicago. Achievement.org states that within a year, Winfrey lifted AM Chicago from the bottom of the ratings pile to being the highest rated talk show in Chicago. Episodes were expanded to an hour, and in 1985 it was officially rechristened The Oprah Winfrey Show. The Oprah Winfrey Show was nationally syndicated in September 1986. Again, according to the Academy of Achievement, it took less than a year for the show to become number one, in the television business standard Nielsen ratings. In the show’s first year of eligibility for the Emmy Awards, Winfrey won three Emmys in the categories of Outstanding Host, Outstanding Talk/Service Program, and Outstanding Direction. The Academy of Achievement notes that in June 1988, The Oprah Winfrey Show won its second consecutive Daytime Emmy Award as Outstanding Talk/Service Program, and Winfrey herself was named the International Radio and Television Societys "Broadcaster of the Year". In IRTS’s 25-year history, as noted by the Academy, Winfrey was “the youngest person and only the fifth woman” to be so honored. In 1998, she formed her own production company, HARPO Productions, based in Chicago, which the Hugh Esten-edited achievement.org profile cites as having become a major player in the film and television industry. In October 1998, HARPO took full responsibility for the production of The Oprah Winfrey Show, making Winfrey, as the Academy of Achievement notes, “the first woman [in history] ever to own and produce a talk show of her own.” The Academy also cites Winfrey as a founding partner in Oxygen Media, Inc., a cable TV channel whose niche is television programming for women. Oprah Winfrey has reached millions of consumers all around the world, primarily through her show, The Oprah Winfrey Show. Other popular media through which she connects to her worldwide audience include magazines- O, The Oprah Magazine and O at Home-, radio-the Oprah and Friends channel on XM satellite radio- and the web- Oprah.com. According to Forbes magazine, Winfrey was the most powerful celebrity in 2007—the year she endorsed Obama—and 2008. This is based on a ranking that “analyzes celebrity earnings, plus media metrics like Google hits, press mentions as compiled by Lexis/Nexis, TV/radio mentions from Factiva and the number of times an A-lister appears on the cover of 32 major consumer magazines”. She also ranked first in web presence and TV or radio mentions. However, it is not the breadth of Oprah Winfrey’s reach in the media- as gigantic as it is- or the consistency of her television ratings- as brilliant as they are- that makes Winfrey’s media life special. What makes hers a truly distinctive media career has been her significant and measurable effect on the consumer choices and lifestyle decisions that people make. Sportsmen haven’t been able to sell Adidas or Nike shoes the way Oprah can sell Random House books. The mention of a product can quite often mean that the products sales increase a thousand fold- unusual activity in any stream of business. One example of this is the now defunct ‘Oprah’s Book Club’. This segment was introduced in 1996. The segment focused on new books and classics, and often brought obscure novels to popular attention. Because of this, Winfrey has been credited with repopularizing book-buying and reading in the United States. For her Book Club, Oprah would select books and then approximately one month later would have an hour long show featuring the author of the novel (or an expert on the novel in cases of deceased authors). Each of the first 48 books selected for the show became a top 10 best seller and these sales successes lasted longer than the month for which the book was included in the club. The book club became such a powerful force that whenever Winfrey introduced a new book as her book-club selection, it instantly became a best-seller. This phenomenon even found its own linguistic representation in popular culture. People came to call the phenomenon of a products sales increase after a mention on the Oprah Winfrey show as the Oprah Effect. The following table is an illustration of how book sales increased soon after their being introduced into Oprah’s Book Club. It contains weekly sales from Nielsen Bookscan for several books included in the club. As can be seen, Oprah’s mentioning of a book has usually resulted in its sales picking up by at least a 1000 percentage points. This kind of influence on consumer behavior by one single personality has no parallel in any industry. Even classics, such as Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina were tremendously helped by inclusion in Oprah’s book Club. 11,648 units sold during the 12 weeks prior to inclusion in the club. In the 12 weeks following inclusion, this book sold 643,122 units—a staggering increase of 5,421%. Oprah Winfrey has also featured in the prayers of many a marketing executive, even outside the publishing industry. This is especially so, when Winfrey decides to publicize one of her ‘Oprah’s Favourites’ list. Her reference can literally mean the success or failure of a variety of products. For example, when the cosmetic company Philosophy’s “Gingerbread Man Salt Scrub” was included in the 2004 favorite things list, the company was forced to rearrange its entire production schedule to meet the resulting demand (Walker, 2004). After selecting Ciao Bella blood orange sorbet for her 2007 list, the company’s website received three million hits in one week compared to an average of 175,000 in previous weeks. Clarisonic skin-care system had their sales increase ten-fold in just one week after her endorsement. After challenging her viewers to beat the one day sales record for Lance Armstrong “Livestrong” bracelets, 900,000 bracelets were sold—besting previous records by approximately 600,000. Winfrey’s ability to influence the purchasing decisions of her followers exceeds that of a traditional talk show host. A negative comment by Winfrey can be equally damaging to a product’s success. Winfrey’s wrath can ruin an author as readily as her approval builds him up, as witness the case of A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, a story documented on Time.com. Time recounts that the book was supposedly Frey’s memoir of addiction and recovery, the very stuff that Oprah loves to present and share. Sales of the book predictably skyrocketed, which must have meant a generous windfall for Frey. Then came Frey’s confession that some of the most powerful parts of the book were embellished and even fabricated. After initially standing by her endorsement of the book, Winfrey later told her audience that she had made a mistake and apologized for it. Next, she brought down her wrath on the author--on the air. Frey’s reputation as an author was shredded and the publisher offered refunds to buyers of A Million Little Pieces who had thought it was all real. Frey’s next book, Bright Shiny Morning, was published in no uncertain terms as a novel and turned out to be a huge publishing failure, even though it received tremendous publicity- albeit negative- as being the book written by “the con artist”. During a 1996 show concerning “mad cow” disease Winfrey stated that her fear of the disease “stopped me from eating another burger”. The day after the show cattle futures fell 10%. Winfrey was subsequently sued by a group of cattleman claiming they suffered losses of $12 million. Winfrey came off victorious. The victory and the background case show that even an industry with as much power, as much clout as the American beef industry cannot pick a battle with Winfrey and expect to win. Oprah Winfrey’s power is probably best illustrated by her effects on the 2008 American presidential election. Barack Obama announced he was running for election as President of the United States in February 2007. Three months later he was endorsed by the talk show host Oprah Winfrey. A 2007 poll of likely voters conducted by Forbes Magazine found that Winfrey’s influence in the commercial sector may also translate to politics. Fourteen percent of likely voters, and 26% of likely voters aged between 18 and 24 years old, said that they would react positively to an endorsement by Winfrey. This was the highest percentage for any celebrity included in the survey. According to the Pew Research Center, 23% of Democrats said that Winfrey’s endorsement would make them more likely to vote for Obama. In the ensuing Democratic party Primary, her endorsement of Obama is credited with having delivered around a million votes to the Obama campaign. This is hugely significant considering the extremely closely fought nature of the party primary and the overwhelming support that the Democratic party received in the 2008 Presidential elections. But why Oprah? What is it about Oprah that has made her influential in a way that no other media personality has managed to be? It is probably her not confirming to stereotypes about television super-personalities that has ensured that her success and influence has not been limited to the normal standards of influence that television personalities have. Oprah Winfrey is the antithesis of the stereotype of a popular host for American television. She is not male, not white, not blonde, not depressingly thin and cannot boast of having had a ‘normal’ middle class background that most American broadcasters and specifically talk show hosts have. In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practises, Stuart Hall writes that when talk is used over action on television, it is primarily used to target female audiences. Hall claims that “Talk is culturally defined as feminine, involving the exercise of skills and methods of understanding developed by women” (Hall, 371). Winfrey using Talk as her medium of choice has established a female cultural verisimilitude about her image in popular culture. Author Deborah Tannen, quoted on the Website melissathornton.com, has been one of many to describe Winfrey’s style as “rapport-talk,” a feminine type of dialogue distinguished from the “report-talk” typical of men. Hall also claims that the sharing of secrets and disclosure of feelings forms much of the basis for friendships between girls and women, and Oprah Winfrey has shown conspicuous skill at “befriending” the women who watched her. Her discussion of her weight problems on air allowed millions of women struggling with the same problem all around the world to relate to her. Where many other prettier female television hosts with extremely well-toned bodies might have alienated or even intimidated their audiences, Winfrey managed to convey a sense of being just another woman that women audiences could share their problems with. All of these things have built her an image of being “real”. It was also a highly populist dialogue, replacing experts with ordinary people in discussions of the issues people faced in life as members of the studio audience were allowed to join and share their thoughts and experiences. Winfrey has never been shy to shed tears on television while discussing emotionally complicated issues. The emotional exchanges on Winfrey’s show were often the occasion not just for tears, but for hugs. With every televised tear and hug, Winfrey made herself a reassuring presence, telling her audience both in the studio and at home that everything was going to be all right after all. Also, Oprah Winfrey was portrayed as being a source through which the feelings and perceptions of a wide and disparate audience could be focused, creating unity out of differences while respecting individual integrity. She provided a forum in which the widest range of voices could be heard- female, black, white, heterosexual, homosexual- and at the same time be brought together in shared understanding. In this way, Winfrey showed a gift for creating understanding out of disparity and order out of conflict, if not outright chaos. Viewers could come away from an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show with the feeling of having “been a part of something” that they could take with them, keep, and share with others. In this way, Oprah created what Emile Durkheim called a “collective conscience” (Durkheim, 99). Durkheim writes that “for the collective feelings which the penal penal law of a people at a particular moment in its history protects, to penetrate individual consciousness that had hitherto remained closed to them, or to assume greater authority, they would have to acquire an intensity greater than they had had up to then.” (Durkheim, 100.) Oprah Winfrey appealed to these collective feelings when she started campaigning, and eventually established a national list of sex offenders in 2001. Her own stories of having been molested a child gave her an authenticity that other television hosts, or for that matter, campaigners and social workers can rarely lay claim to. In Reading with Oprah: The Book Club that Changed America, Kathleen Rooney describes Winfrey as "a serious American intellectual who pioneered the use of electronic media, specifically television and the Internet, to take reading — a decidedly non-technological and highly individual act — and highlight its social elements and uses in such a way to motivate millions of erstwhile non-readers to pick up books.” According to Pierre Bourdieu, “the relations of communication are inseparably intertwined with those of power.” (Bourdieu, 26). In other words, those who can affect what visions of the world people see and believe can exert vast cultural, social, and political power. With this power comes the ability to present images to which people will conform, and the ability to transform the visions of others. Cultural codes, buzzwords, and presentation can all have a binding effect on society and on groups within society. This links communication with the power to construct entire visions of reality for the masses. It is a power that Oprah Winfrey has mastered in a way that few other public or media figures have ever accomplished. The sharing and catharsis on The Oprah Winfrey Show had another effect on the audience. It bonded and unified people from across the country and different walks of life into what amounted to a kind of surrogate community. It was a community not of neighbors but of affinities; a national or global village based not on geography but on shared understandings. And it was a community organized not by a government or a political entity, but created by the mass media. As Benedict Anderson, author of Imagined Communities, put it, the community that The Oprah Winfrey Show created was one whose members “never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion". (Anderson, 6). The sense of community- and communion--based on empathy with her viewers would be the basis of Oprah Winfrey’s power. Her implicit message was “I’ve been where you are. Look where I am now. And now, where are we going?” Winfrey positioned herself as the spiritual “sister” of millions of women who adopted her as their own. At one time in her series, she actually used the song “I’m Every Woman” as her theme. By the fact of her presence on television and her acts of emotional sharing, she empowered her audience, who in turn empowered her as only the mass media in America can. By appearing as “one of us,” Oprah Winfrey was actually able to lift herself far above the admiring masses into the wealthiest one percent of the population, and she has been almost universally loved for doing so: for if “we are all Oprah,” then any one of “us” can do as she has done. It was the American Dream in action, a lighthouse ray of hope from sea to shining sea and beyond. Since the rest of the world looks to America as a ray of hope even as Americans look to individuals like Winfrey for inspiration, Oprah Winfrey became the symbol of the hopes not just of America, but of the world. Oprah has also made sure that her television and magazine ratings stay consistent, with dips always being succeeded by significant rises. This has been achieved usually by attaching Oprah Winfrey with the significant issues of the day. Another example of Oprah rebuilding herself was observed last year. Ratings for The Oprah Winfrey Show, as noted by Guy Adams on www.tribune.ie, had declined by nearly seven percent in 2007, the second consecutive year that its numbers had dwindled. The article also observes that Oprah’s Big Give, an unscripted show about a philanthropic competition, had seen its audience erode by one-third during the eight weeks of its run. The Oprah Magazine had lost ten percent of its circulation in the last three years. Adams contends the possible explanation for this fall-off was that, like everything else in popular culture, Oprah Winfrey had reached a saturation point. “Both the celebrity and her audience were aging, and younger audiences had not been flocking to Winfrey as the generation before them had.” However, Oprah Winfrey gave her endorsement of candidate Barack Obama, thereby attaching herself to front pages of newspapers around the world and getting mentions in the most influential editorial sections. This resulted in a rise in The Oprah Winfrey Show’s Nielsen ratings. Even more significant was a sizable increase in The Oprah Magazine’s rise in circulation in the weeks succeeding her endorsement. However, In popular culture as in everything else, the old must eventually give way to the new. This, and the all-consuming drive for ratings, may be the only limits to Winfrey’s power. Michel Foucault argued that society has practiced an institutionalized repression of sexuality since the 18th Century, a social code that treated the desire for pleasure and the enjoyment of the human body as something to be frowned upon except in the context of a heterosexual marriage. An article on ipce.info summarizes Foucault’s writings on the subject. In an environment in which sexuality at all is viewed as shameful and corrupt except within those narrow confines, all forms of sexual expression come under attack, and none more so than the love and intimacy of gays. At the same time, however, Foucault pointed out a deep irony about the demonization of sex: that this repression has not so much driven sex underground as it has created an obsession and fixation upon sexual matters. The Christian ethic in particular has created an “urge to confess” about sexuality, “as if there would be no such thing if it were not confessed.” This is related to the uniquely gay process of “coming out” or declaring one’s sexuality to others, an experience with no equivalent in heterosexual life. These conditions have, of course, persisted right into the present day and engendered a climate of blatant homophobia that is only now starting to show signs of eroding. The coming-out process, marked as it is by making open, self-revealing statements to others, has a clear relation to the self-sharing, self-revealing dialogues that are the staple of The Oprah Winfrey Show. This made Winfrey’s televised forum a natural one for the discussion of gay issues and for the talk-show host’s personal support of gay causes. As Oprah Winfrey turned other tragedies and adversities in her life into material for televised discourse, she did the same with the loss of her gay half-brother to AIDS--revealed on the talk show in 2004--and brought acceptance of gays and the importance of gay rights into the spotlight of her program. When Oprah Winfrey talks, the community that has grown around her listens. This has bred what might be described as a “participatory democracy” and a type of political and social dialogue that might be called “the Oprahfication of society”. The same method of cathartic emotional sharing that Winfrey brought to the discussion of intimate personal issues has proven just as effective a vehicle for public discourse. By bringing together, for example, a rape victim and her attacker on the same stage and initiating a dialogue between them in which the audience can take part, Winfrey created a kind of televised town meeting in which ordinary people in their homes could discuss the politics of sexual power or any other issue in American life. The Oprah Winfrey Show fostered a sense of individual empowerment at the public level as well as the private. In Oprah Winfrey’s own words, included in her Academy of Achievement listing, “It doesn’t matter who you are, where you come from. The ability to triumph begins with you--always.” If there is any single unifying theme in The Oprah Winfrey Show and in the relationship of its host with her viewers and the world and society around her, it is in this statement. Oprah Winfrey’s life is a story of spectacular personal triumph. Her message to others is that anyone can be triumphant. Wherever and whenever she appears, her message, or the message that others take from her, is “I am you and you are me.” Her public persona as an empowered woman who empowers other women has taken only one serious blow: the Guy Adams articles points out that when she appeared with Barack Obama in Iowa and South Carolina, she faced criticism on the message boards of her website, “accusing her of betraying her own sex.” Still, the fact that her talk show retained its number-one rating for 471 consecutive weeks tells us that in spite of the erosion of her audience and the few setbacks she has experienced, Oprah Winfrey is a media, cultural, and social institution, and neither she nor the love she has inspired in so many people are about to go away. Institutions, by nature, have great staying power. Everything she has ever done before the public has been about not hiding, but revealing: secrets, sorrows, pains, joys, struggles, victories--Winfrey has always been about putting things out for the world to see. Whatever hidden aspect there is to her power is concealed only by the meanings that people bring to the woman and her work, and those things, as Stuart Hall made clear, are accessible to decoding by anyone who makes the effort to examine them. (Hall, 27.) The “hidden” power of Oprah Winfrey is simply her power to find what is hidden in everyone, for good or ill--and she emphasizes the good- and bring it out into the light. To many, Oprah Winfrey is the American Dream incarnate, for the way she has embodied not only the dream itself, but the possibilities and the ideals behind it. Works Cited “Oprah Winfrey.” Wikipedia. . Adams. Guy. “Profile: Oprah Winfrey, American Dream.” 1 June 2008. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, England: Verso Books, 1991. Author Unknown. “The History of Sexuality.” . Bourdieu, Anthony. Language & Symbolic Power. Harvard University. Press 1991. Durkheim, Emile. Rules of Sociological Method. Macmillan, 1992. Hugh Esten, ed. “Oprah Winfrey.” Academy of Achievement. 25 May 2006. http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/win0bio-1. Hall, Stuart. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. The Open University, 1991. Pickert, Kate. “Oprah’s Book Club.” Time 26 Sept. 2008. . Tannen, Deborah. “Oprah Winfrey, Alpha Female.” . Walker, Rob, “Annointed by Oprah,” The New York Times, Dec 19, 2004. http://www.econ.umd.edu/~garthwaite/celebrityendorsements_garthwaitemoore.pdf   Read More