Opinion | Oprah's Bunk Club (Published 2006)
- ️https://www.nytimes.com/by/maureen-dowd
- ️Sat Jan 28 2006
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Op-Ed Columnist
- Jan. 28, 2006
We should have known the guy was not really a bad-boy, tattooed "It's time to throw down" brawler when he had to bring his mom on the Larry King show to protect him.
On Thursday, the unmasked memoirist's proud mother was replaced by a punitive national matriarch. Watching Oprah flay Frey was riveting. At The Times and at Doubleday, staffers were glued to their TV sets.
It was a huge relief, after our long national slide into untruth and no consequences, into Swift boating and swift bucks, into W.'s delusion and denial, to see the Empress of Empathy icily hold someone accountable for lying and conning -- and embarrassing her. (Though she and her producers should have known questions were raised early on about the book.)
In a society obsessed with sin and redemption, this was the superfecta: Oprah admitting her flawed judgment and rescuing her reputation, while carving up James Frey for sinning in his book about sin and redemption.
Oprah interviewed and showed taped clips of her media critics (including me) and credited her turnaround to the essay by The Times's chief book critic, Michiko Kakutani, who wrote, "It is a case about how much value contemporary culture places on the very idea of truth."
When President Bush cut into Oprah's show with a press conference, perhaps he was trying to get the focus off truth. It was truly weird to see the twin live TV moments: A disgraced author, and a commander in chief who keeps writing chapter after chapter of fictionalized propaganda.