Risky Business

"But we forget it was Oprah who trashed up daytime TV. She took the Donahue format and threw in shouting, screaming lowlifes, which made her a ratings hit and which everyone else -- including Donahue -- then copied. Then, and only then, did she get religion. She did a show about how wonderful she was to recant and become, overnight, the queen of quality TV. Her bookers tried to get me on that show -- as a TV critic at the time -- to praise her. To the consternation of my company's flacks, I refused."

In the NYT, Virginia Heffernan sees a virtuoso performance:

"Just like back in the days when her guests were abusers and sexual deviants, Ms. Winfrey came for vengeance -- and vengeance on behalf of the poor, the voiceless and the women above all, who get conned and defrauded and violated by men who think they're so bad. But because Ms. Winfrey never sounds just one note, she turned in an uncanny performance, modulating her aggression with such finesse that she seemed to be the penitent one, and not the one with the whip hand.

"She had promoted Mr. Frey's book in her all-powerful book club; now he had embarrassed her. But the mistake, to hear her tell it, was Ms. Winfrey's own: she had defended Mr. Frey, most notably on 'Larry King Live,' and in so doing 'left the impression that the truth does not matter.' Having come clean herself, she felt free to savage Mr. Frey, hammering him with questions and heaving deep sighs of fury until he stammered with cartoonish diffidence: 'I -- I -- I --.'"

Chicago Tribune columnist Phil Rosenthal says Oprah was just retooling her product:

"Winfrey's righteous anger and regret over the role she, her show and her book club played in this tawdry episode may well have been genuine. But it was also a shrewd move by a brilliant businesswoman, acutely aware that millions buy what she sells because they believe in her, and she no longer believed in something she had sold them.

"It was good business and great TV. After all, when an automaker recalls a defective car, you never get to see the head of the company tearing into the engineer responsible for what went wrong."

In Salon, Hillary Frey (no relation) is uneasy:

"Good for Oprah, right? Admitting being wrong, as Oprah has no doubt counseled guests on her show many times, isn't an easy thing to do, especially in front of millions of people. . . .

"No doubt her many, many followers (and admirers like myself) have been waiting for Oprah to finally pronounce James Frey a fraud, and to distance herself both from the flimsy book that she made into a phenomenon, and from the lying man she made into a hero.

"Yet, even for those of us who have wanted to see Frey go down in flames for his lies, 'Oprah' was unnerving. As Oprah pounded Frey over various moments in his memoir that have either been proved false or remain dubious (for instance, when and how Lilly, his rehab girlfriend, died, or whether Frey had two root canals without anesthesia), one couldn't help (dare I say it) feeling a little bit sorry for James Frey. As the audience clapped when Oprah spit out a real zinger ('It's a lie!'; 'I think you presented a false person'), it was hard to avoid thinking that Frey was being put on display not to set the record straight, but for a public flogging. More than once Oprah emphasized that this experience has 'embarrassed' her. Her revenge: shaming another person in front of a live studio audience. Who knew that Oprah was an 'eye for an eye' kind of lady?"

At long last, Frey's publisher is doing something :