Oprah Getting Slammed
The latest thump on the controversial best-seller “A
Million Little Pieces” is a Seattle federal court lawsuit seeking damages
on behalf of consumers for the “lost time” they spent reading the
book.Marketed as a redemptive tale in the form of a drug
and alcohol memoir, the book by James Frey had sold more than 2 million copies
as of last week, according to The New York Times. But it has also drawn fire
after an investigative Web site, The Smoking Gun, reported this month that
it was full of exaggerations and inaccuracies.
Myers alleges several legal causes for the suit, including
breach of contract, unjust enrichment, negligent misrepresentation, intentional
misrepresentation and violation of the Washington Consumer Protection Act.
Since culture is one of my main subjects, it's easy to rise to bait like the
above.
Ah, if only it was so easy to sue George W. Bush for the lost lives, lost prestige,
lost time not paying attention to Iran. If only.
But the bottom line is that the Oprah
channeling George phenomenon continues, with Deborah Howell being the latest
big power person unwilling to cop to a mistake.
Oprah, like
the other two in this menage a trois of truth skimmers, got a second chance,
but again, demurred.
And Ms. Winfrey’s rebuke to the publishing industry
was as false as Mr. Frey’s root-canal story. At that moment, on Larry
King, she had the power to do something about the industry’s practices.
She could have given Random House the same treatment she gave Hermès—calling
out Mr. Frey as a fraud right there, denouncing the book as a lie and urging
her viewer-readers to return it en masse, demanding refunds. She could have
ordered the company to take the hundreds of thousands of extra dollars that
Oprah’s Book Club had brought it and use the money to hire a raft of
$25,000-a-year fact-checkers to ensure that nonfiction books were sold on
something more than the author’s say-so.But that would mean admitting that she, Oprah, had been peddling false redemption.
And that sale had already been made. The units had shipped. The selected viewer
is in rehab, and the audience saw her go there.
Now, some media outlets, like Joe Scarborough, are reporting that
Oprah's producers were told that parts of James Frey's story were fabricated
before she gave her book club endorsement.
This isn't over by a long shot.
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