A million little thoughts on today's Oprah

(By Erik)

I don’t usually watch Oprah, but as I was flipping around the dial tonight I caught a few minutes of the rerun of her show from earlier today.

The queen of talk had James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces making a return visit. Instead of praising his book like she did last time, Oprah lit into the guy, accusing him of fabricating parts of his so-called memoir.

Long story short, Frey wrote a book about his years as a drug addict, his arrests, court appearances and his recovery. A Web site called The Smoking Gun investigated and found that the book is mostly horse plop. Evidently the author got confused and described what likely was a three-hour stay in jail as an 87-day stay in jail. (But I know it’s easy to lose track of time when you’re in the Big House.)

Here are some thoughts on today’s Oprah and “Freygate.”

• I’m kinda’ surprised that people are so surprised about this. Embellishment seems to be a defining characteristic of people who used to be “bad” and now have recovered in some way.

I remember several chapel talks and devotionals at Lipscomb featuring people who talked about their devious pasts and God-fearing redemptions. They always made themselves sound a lot worse than I suspect they really were, and we all just accepted that.

• Why was Frey willing to go on Oprah? His book continues to sell well regardless of (or maybe because of) the controversy. He’s no dummy.

• Why was this story broken by some Web site called The Smoking Gun and not by the New York Times or even Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff? Have the traditional news outlets lost their investigative edge? I’ve done some police reporting, and what these Web guys found was easy to track down.

• There was a sort of “hole” in Frey’s hair where you could see clear through to his scalp. That bugged me.

• The article on The Smoking Gun’s site exposing the fabrications is HORRIBLE! It’s some of the worst journalistic writing I’ve ever seen. It’s about six pages long and constantly references itself. (Nobody cares how many phone calls you made or how many man-hours you logged while pursuing the story.) Investigative reporting demands good writing.

• The joke that the guy from the Poynter Institute made was stupid. Nobody laughed. I felt sorry for him.

• Looking at the book’s cover, all I can think of is, “Mmmmmm … sprinkles.”

• Oprah has long been seen as the focus of postmodern beliefs. The “church of Oprah” basically states that you should believe in whatever works for you — whether it’s Jesus, karma or prayers to the almighty Scratch N’ Win (well, maybe not that last one).

Increasingly, we live in a society that rejects the notion of absolute truth. I think that, on some level, this influenced Frey when he wrote his book. Maybe he even thought that writing a “memoir” allowed him to create his own version of reality. If objective truth is merely an illusion anyway, what’s the harm?

It’s interesting to me that Oprah herself — who tells viewers to believe what they want to believe in matters of faith — has come forward to say, “That’s enough. You’re lying. That’s wrong.” While confronting Frey, Oprah openly praised the value of truth on her show — a notion that postmodernity rejects. Could this be a turning point, where we realize that absolute truth actually exists and has value?

• There are WAY too many commercial breaks during Oprah’s show.