Oprah is redeemed, but questions linger

I hereby take back every snarky thing I’ve ever said about Oprah Winfrey.

With her stunning admission on Thursday’s broadcast of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” that she’d been duped by James Frey, author of the now-disputed “A Million Little Pieces,” she single-handedly restored credibility to the concept of truth in advertising — and in publishing and journalism.

Her precision smackdown of Frey and his editor helped, by extension, to bolster the mission of the nation’s beleaguered ranks of mainstream journalists.  And irresistibly, it all made for excellent television.   “I left the impression that the truth doesn’t matter, and for that I am deeply sorry,” she said at the top of her live broadcast. “That is not what I believe….and to those who challenged me, you were absolutely right.”

That comment, delivered in Winfrey’s trademark, low-pitched “Now-listen up-cause-I-am-serious-as-a-heart-attack” voice, kicked off the beginning of her remarkable mea culpa show. And in a big way, it also re-established the once-solid line between fact and fiction in commercial publishing, all under the guise of putting an end to the three week-old controversy surrounding Frey’s book. 

As I see it, though, at least a few pressing questions remain, including the role of Frey’s publisher in the mess.

Why did Doubleday’s Nan A. Talese, the editor of “Pieces” who bravely if somewhat foolishly sat down on Oprah’s show, not give a clear yes or no answer when asked about the basic truth of Frey’s story?  Talese, a doyenne of New York’s book publishing universe and the wife of journalist Gay Talese, came off as weirdly out of touch and patronizing.

“Yes, the whole situation is very sad,” she said to Oprah at one point, speaking in a stiff, Mid-Atlantic accent.  To which Oprah replied, “It is not a sad situation for me, it is embarrassing; embarrassing and disappointing.”

A prior history
No one on the broadcast mentioned the fact that Winfrey and Talese have history, as they say: Talese in the early 1990s published journalist Alex Kotlowitz’s critically-acclaimed nonfiction book, “There Are No Children Here,” which details the poignant story of single black woman in Chicago’s ghetto struggling to raise her sons. 

Oprah optioned the book and turned it into a television movie in mid-1990s. (And Kotlowitz, by the way, printed a short disclaimer at the front of the book, saying that he changed the names of some of the individuals in the story to protect their identities.)

In light of that past connection, I waited during Thursday’s broadcast for Oprah to ask Talese an obvious question: Are the rules for a nonfiction book detailing the hard-luck life of a poor black woman  different than that of a memoir detailing the hard-luck life of a middle-class white man from Michigan?  If so, why?  And if they aren’t, what changed in the years between the two books’ publications?

Still, with the stakes as high as they were, Oprah's broadcast was one for the ages.

As the three week-old controversy brewed over the veracity of Frey’s “memoir,” the most important aspect of the story was in danger of being obscured by the glitzy  marquee players involved: Oprah Winfrey, America’s Conscience and Supreme Ruler of Daytime Talk Shows; Talese, one of the most powerful women in big-ticket book publishing; and veteran broadcaster Larry King, whose eponymous national TV program gave legs to the flap on Jan. 11. (Caught between the two larger-than-life women on Thursday's show, Frey looked like a lost little boy, or as CNN anchor Anderson Cooper observed less generously, “a scared rat.”)

All along, as New York Times columnist Frank Rich noted in a recent column that landed him a seat on Oprah’s show, the underlying shame of the whole affair resided in its brazen flouting of the once-sacred line between fact and fiction. “Truthiness,” as Rich observed, borrowing a nutty-but-succinct word from Comedy Central frontman Stephen Colbert, has been on the rise in America in recent years.

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