Oprah and The Trib in a north-end cafe

It was the new media brought Oprah Winfrey back to earth, as an investigative website compelled her to change her mind about a lurid "memoir" she'd promoted. But her turnaround, live on TV, occasioned some delightful old media-style journalism in The Chicago Tribune. To make it all a perfect moment, I got to read all about it this morning over an old-fashioned breakfast of corned beef hash and scrambled eggs at a north-end cafe on 9th Street.

Oprah, as the whole world must know by now, announced Thursday she no longer believed James Frey's tale of his self-described "recovery" from "addiction" in a book titled A Million Little Pieces. He was first caught out on The Smoking Gun, a website that specializes in running police reports on celebrities, after Oprah heavily promoted his book on her show and in her book club. At first she defended him, most prominently on the Larry King Live show. But apparently she changed her tune after addiction treatment professionals questioned both the book and her endorsement of it. And Thursday she let him have it with both barrels, on her TV show aired on WLS-TV of Chicago.

So Friday morning, the Oprah story was bannered across the front page of The Trib under the headline "Oprah shreds Frey in a million pieces." It bumped the story on Hamas' landslide election victory in Palestine, which took up most of the rest of the front page, and smaller stories on an ongoing Trib investigation into contaminated tuna fish and two indictments in Chicago city government.

A good old-fashioned, Chicago-style news day to go with the hash and eggs, in other words.

"To me, a memoir means it's the truth of your life as you know it to be and not blatant fictionalization," Oprah told Frey, a studio audience, TV viewers nationwide ... and people like me who read about it in The Trib. "I feel that you conned us all," she added. "I think the publisher has a responsibility ... I'm trusting you."

That's the important point. Frey's book started out, by his account, as a novel. But it was marketed as non-fiction, apparently at the suggestion of his publisher, the Doubleday imprint of Random House (itself a subsidiary of the multinational Bertlesmann AG conglomorate of Germany). Non-fiction is supposed to be true. Period. Paragraph. End of story.

"It is difficult for me to talk to you because I really feel duped," Oprah told Frey, as quoted in a transcript printed verbatim in Friday's Trib. "I feel duped. More importantly, I feel you betrayed millions of readers. And I think, you know, it's such a gift to have millions of people to read your work, and that bothers me greatly. And so now as I sit here today, I don't know what is truth and I don't know what isn't."

Also weighing in Friday morning were the Trib's Internet critic Steve Johnson, media columnist Phil Rosenthal and cityside human interest columnists John Kass and Mary Schmich. In a perceptive column, Rosenthal noted that "what was being saved on 'The Oprah Winfrey Show' was the Oprah brand." He explained:

Lest we forget, Oprah and Oprah's Bookclub are registered trademarks of Winfrey's Harpo Inc. ... They are symbols of an expansive realm that includes television, film, publishing, philanthropy and, most recently, even a Broadway musical.

Rosenthal, who suggested he's covered Oprah too long to completely buy her on-air explanation, said "this incident may prove worthy of future college study," however it turns out.

Other commentators, away from Chicago, were perhaps a little less cynical. The New York Times editorialized, "In a remarkable moment of television, Ms. Winfrey did what we have so often waited for public figures to do: she admitted openly that she had made a mistake in supporting Mr. Frey." And in a commentary on the MSNBC website, cultural critic Amy Alexandersaid it helped re-establish "the once-solid line between fact and fiction in commercial publishing." She said the implications go well beyond the book trade:

Despite the public’s apparent willingness to live with lies tricked out as truth —- embodied by reality shows, the government’s trumped-up evidence of “mushroom clouds” emanating from Iraq, and most recently by Frey -— such faux facts have no place in nonfiction book publishing, journalism or government.

These are serious issues. We do have a culture of obfuscation and cover-up on the national scene. But the Trib's treatment, and the age-old spectacle of a Chicago newspaper making hay with one of the star attractions on a competing TV station, made awfully good breakfast reading.