Oprah, the truth ... and the President

It goes beyond ironic ...

Oprah Winfrey, on live TV today, turns on James Frey, whose work she had championed both on her own show and a call-in to the Larry King Live show when his memoir was fact-checked, if you'll forgive the metaphor, into a million little pieces ... she all but accuses him of lying, and his publisher of negligence ... she says he "duped" her ... visibly angry, she stands up for the truth ... and then smack in the middle of the show, her TV station cuts into the program for a press conference with President Bush.

Here's how the Chicago Tribune's web critic Steve Johnson captured the moment in today's "Hypertext" blog:

In a galvanizing telecast Thursday morning (or at least the beginning of one), she admitted that she was wrong for defending him in the first place. "I regret that phone call [to `Larry King Live,' where Frey was appearing]. I made a mistake, and I left the impression that the truth does not matter, and I am deeply sorry about that.... To everyone who has challenged me on the issue of truth, you are absolutely right."

She had called Frey back to her show for a live (in Chicago) broadcast, and instead of trying to find a way to buttress Frey and the book, she flat-out called him on the carpet. "It's difficult for me to talk to you because I really feel duped," she told Frey. "I'm just wondering, why do you have to lie about that?"

And, Johnson says, the moment was important:

[Winfrey's fan base], in Chicago live and elsewhere when the show airs this afternoon, was hearing from on high that real truth (not emotional truth, or essential truth) matters very much. That if you read and love a book (a person, a politician, etc.) that turns out to have been based on a lie, the proper response is not to blindly defend, but to question it harshly and learn from the mistake. That, perhaps most important in this era of covering up mistakes by pointing fingers elsewhere, it's okay to admit simply that you were wrong.

It was shaping up to be a great performance, proof that I was wrong in my skepticism of her, and a reminder of why Winfrey has been able to remain central in American culture for so long. She retains, despite her wealth, fame and the insularity they bring, a strong moral compass and great instincts. One of the greatest of those is the ability to say, simply, "I was wrong."

Here, again in Johnson's words, is what happened next:

And then WLS-Ch. 7, the station where her talk show originated, shockingly cut off the program by cutting to live ABC coverage of President Bush's news conference. Important, potentially, but in the usual order of things, nothing more than a restatement of existing positions. It could have been much better handled with a little creative thinking: Run a screen crawl saying the press conference is happening, and we'll break in if there's news. Or let the screen crawl pass along Bush quotes.

I will leave it to others to assess Oprah and Bush, their respective reputations for truthfulness and how each might have contributed to our culture "of covering up mistakes by pointing fingers elsewhere." But let it be recorded that according to the White House transcript of the press conference, Bush said, "We're going to stay on the offense in the war against terror," and added, "... we'll do all this and at the same time protect the civil liberties of our people."

Presidential news conferences are important, even when the President doesn't have anything particularly new to say. But a screen crawl, or an audio stream on the station's website (like Chicago public radio station WBEZ-FM carried) would have done the trick for this one.