HolyCoast: Oprah and Sarah
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Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Oprah and Sarah

This could be good:
Oprah Winfrey, on a campaign to climb back from last season's ratings slump, will attempt to kiss and make up with conservative viewers on Nov. 16 when she has Sarah Palin on her syndicated talk show.

...It's not just another show booking for Oprah Winfrey. She's going whole hog this season to try to recover from the ratings tumble she took last season when her audience slid to under 7 million viewers. And, during one awful week in July, "The Oprah Winfrey Show" suffered its smallest ratings since its debut way back in 1985.

Industry navel gazers speculated Oprah had turned off some of her conservative viewers -- or, more accurately, they had turned her off -- when she not only endorsed then presidential candidate Barack Obama but even campaigned for him. (Palin, of course, was the running mate of Obama's rival, Sen. John McCain.)

It was the first time Oprah had stripped off her apolitical veneer and publicly endorsed a political candidate. At the time, Oprah told CNN's Larry King she did it because "what [Obama] stands for" was "worth me going out on a limb for."

And her ratings took a tumble, though hers was not the only syndicated show to lose audience last season and she still managed to wind up at the top of the syndication heap at season's end.

Even so, Oprah has largely abandoned her whole aspirational programming mantra this season and gone in for the more purely commercial.
I wonder if the issue of Oprah refusing to book Palin on her show during the campaign will come up? Oprah said she didn't want to politicize the show...at the same time she was campaigning for and promoting Obama.

This will be a ratings bonanza for Oprah...briefly. Conservatives will tune in to see the interview and tune right back out afterwards, depending on how Oprah handles the show. If she does the typical Oprah softball show she might win a few folks back. If she tries to make Palin look bad conservatives will tune out en masse and never come back.

4 comments:

Underdog said...

Oprah masquerades as an angel of light. She is not anything of the sort! She doesn't fool me, nor will changes in her programming like this get me to watch her program.

So much of television is not beneficial or worthwhile to watch. Vacuous, empty content such as Winfrey's epitomizes why I do other things other than watch the boob tube. When you examine carefully the content of her beliefs, they most closely align with New Age, which is merely repackaged Hinduism. Beware!

Even my Sweet Polly Purebred sees the wrong teachings she espouses so passionately, and refuses to watch the program. If she can do so, so can you!

Anonymous said...

Don't do it Sarah!!!

Common Sense said...

Sarah Palin on Oprah Winfrey's show? Really?

That's like George W. Bush on Keith Overbite's show!

Go viral, Sarah, go viral. Word of mouth is far better than compromising yourself with the likes of worldly, spiritually corrupt people like the O.

You can do far better than this, Sarah. Think about it. . . nay, pray about it!

Chrystal K. said...

I think I'd like to watch this episode.