With the interview of Meghan and Harry, Oprah Winfrey still unmissable
Her daily show stopped ten years ago, but Oprah Winfrey remains, at 67, an American cultural icon and go-to TV personality, able to make a splash with her interview with Meghan and Harry, which aired Sunday.
She's a billionaire business leader considered presidential by millions of Americans, but she wouldn't have delegated the Interview of the Year, a two-hour special that aired Sunday on CBS, to anyone. is already advertised as a global television event.
"In a media landscape saturated with sources that give people news or sensationalism, people know that with Oprah, you're going to have a bit of both," says Shennette Garrett-Scott, professor at the University of Mississippi, who taught a class on Oprah Winfrey.
The interview is what made Oprah, born 1954 in Kosciusko, Mississippi, famous. In her show, first, during which she interviewed for 25 years (1986 to 2011) more than 30,000 guests, then, since, here and there, on her own channel OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network) or her podcast SuperSoul .
Launched as a 19-year-old TV reporter in Nashville, Tennessee, Oprah Gayle Winfrey said she understood early on that reporting was "not made" for her. Switched to the talk show by accident, "I knew straight away that I had found my place."
"I have compassion, it's just my nature," she told Stanford students in 2014 to explain her success at the bedside of the anonymous and the powerful. "I want to understand, to be understood and I want to make contact."
It "changed the way people look at opening up in public," says Shennette Garrett-Scott. "It has become acceptable to talk about grief, pain and joy openly."
Raised in a poor family, sexually assaulted during her adolescence by an uncle and a cousin, mother at 14 of a stillborn child, self-made woman, Oprah Winfrey had her own story, her authenticity, and s is always presented to viewers unvarnished.
So popular is her that in January 2018, all it took was a heated speech for social media to see her as President of the United States, before she indicated she was not interested.
Keep your feet on the ground
The first black television presenter to break through, Oprah, whom many refer to only by her first name, was able to create a brand around her name and image with considerable influence in the United States.
From this brand, she made an empire, carried by a sense of business far above the average.
In 2011, she gave up her talk show and launched her own channel, OWN, an equal shareholder with the Discovery group. It will sell, in two installments, part of its shares to Discovery, for more than US $ 100 million, in total.
In 2015, she took 10% of the weight loss specialist Weight Watchers, now WW, and associated the group with her capital, that of a woman who has alternated, throughout her life, diets and weight gain. Immediate success.
His fortune is now estimated by Forbes magazine at US $ 2.7 billion.
A creature of traditional television, it reposition itself regularly to adapt to changes in the audiovisual world. Is the cable running out of steam? It signed a global partnership with the Apple TV + platform in June 2018, more than a year before its launch, in November 2019.
The talk show migrates to podcasts? She is firing on all cylinders with SuperSoul, but also a new audio version of her famous Book Club, and even The Oprah Winfrey Show: the podcast, which selects old episodes from the cult show and adapts them to the new format.
Over 40 years after her wealthy debut, Oprah Winfrey has lost none of that invaluable credibility, bolstered by her humanitarian commitment, which has seen her spend several hundred million dollars for various causes. And her legitimacy as an interviewer is intact.
“The secret of my show, for 25 years, was that people identified with me, they saw themselves in me,” she explained in 2014. “And as I became financially successful, (.. .) I kept my feet on the ground, (...) I worked to stay tuned. ”
