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Why Oprah Winfrey has handed in her notice
The multi-millionairess will concentrate on launching her own TV channel
The most powerful woman on American television, Oprah Winfrey, will announce today that she is to give up her daytime talk show in September 2011, exactly 25 years after she started it. She will not be retiring. Instead, the 55-year-old plans to devote the next stage of her career to launching her own television channel, the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), focusing on women's issues.
The fact that America needs 22 months' notice of her departure is testament to her remarkable influence. Despite its mid-afternoon time slot, and the relatively small audience of 7m homes, the Oprah Winfrey Show has the clout to get anyone it wants on TV, from the US president down.
Anything she turns her hand to seems to succeed: a number of successful spin-off shows - The Dr Oz Show, Rachel Ray and Dr Phil - have helped make Winfrey a millionairess many times over, while Oprah's Book Club is now central to any publisher's marketing strategy.
As Antonia Bland wrote in a profile of Winfrey for The First Post, "Not since the heyday of the 'Book of the Month' club has anyone done so much to promote book-buying."
Winfrey's own story is an extraordinary tale of success against overwhelming odds. She was raised in poverty in rural Mississippi, the daughter of a teenage single mother. She was raped as a child and after she became pregnant at the age of 14, her son died shortly after birth. She has never married - though she has a partner, Stedman Graham - and has never had any more children.
She began her broadcasting career in Nashville, Tennessee, before moving to Chicago in 1984 to host the breakfast show, A.M. Chicago. Within a year it had been renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show and a year later she had set up Harpo and had a nationally syndicated show. The deal she signed then made her a millionairess at the age of 32, a noteworthy achievement for an African American woman.
Today, she's supposed to be worth $2.7bn. Just as important, when she endorsed Barack Obama in 2008, her say-so was estimated to have brought him an extra 1.5m votes, knocking Hillary Clinton out of the race.
And when today's announcement was leaked on Thursday, shares in CBS, which handles her syndication, fell 42 cents on the New York Stock Exchange. ·
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She is leaving the world in a better place than when she arrived... and thats all anyone has to do.
Who wants her to prolong till 2011 before closing the take-away shop. Her success is analogue to KFC,Pepsi and Donut. Oprah and the other three are the worst contributions of the US to the world. I am just fed up with her overacting and big mouth. She has been just promoting pretty nothing hooking an addicted women folk to become couch potatos. Above all she milked millions($) and got fatter for nothing.
I agree with Jerome and Polly. The frightening thing about Oprah is the influence she has in the US. I don't believe for a moment that Obama would be President if she hadn't pushed him. American woman need to think for themselves. They turn in to an hysterical mob when Oprah's around. I find it all so superficial....
Not keen at all on the woman, and have always loathed her shows, so smug and patronising - but that's just my opinion.
So Oprah Winfrey is going to move on to focusing on 'women's issues' (feminist issues). So what else does she think she's been doing for the last twenty five years then? I recall when she gave a free car to every woman in the studio. No men in the studio that day. If Top Gear tried that and only gave cars away to men, they'd never broadcast again. On a programme dealing with the subject of lying, Winfrey asked a guest professor of psychology the loaded question, 'Who lies more, men or women'? I personally would have thought it was men but to my surprise the guy explained that women tell more lies. The brainwashed women in the audience instantly began booing and heckling him. He could hardly reverse himself by lying through his own teeth and saying he'd made a mistake, so he settled for cravenly telling these screaming idiots that he wasn't suggesting that women telling lies was necessarily a bad thing. I despise everything that Oprah Winfrey stands for and cant help wonder if she has lost huge numbers of single female viewers, because she promotes such a twisted feminist version of male/female relationships. Surely many of them must now be at their wits end wondering how to get a man. Simple tip ladies, ignore the Oprah's of this world and be feminine, not feminist.