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"Winfrey, Oprah -- Influence"
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Oprah
“Today on Oprah,” intoned the TV announcer, and all over America viewers tuned in to learn, empathize, and celebrate. In this book, Kathryn Lofton investigates the Oprah phenomenon and finds in Winfrey’s empire—Harpo Productions, O Magazine, and her new television network—an uncanny reflection of religion in modern society. Lofton shows that when Oprah liked, needed, or believed something, she offered her audience nothing less than spiritual revolution, reinforced by practices that fuse consumer behavior, celebrity ambition, and religious idiom. In short, Oprah Winfrey is a media messiah for a secular age. Lofton’s unique approach also situates the Oprah enterprise culturally, illuminating how Winfrey reflects and continues historical patterns of American religions.
eBook
Stories of Oprah
Stories of Oprahis a collection of essays that explores Oprah Winfrey's broad reach as an industry and media brand. Contributors analyze a number of topics touching on the ways in which her cultural output shapes contemporary America. The volume examines how Oprah has fashioned a persona--which emphasizes her rural, poverty-stricken roots over other factors--that helper her popularize her unique blend of New Age spirituality, neoliberal politics, and African American preaching. She packages New Age spirituality through the rhetoric of race, gender, and the black preacher tradition. Oprah's Book Club has reshaped literary publishing, bringing Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and Cormac McCarthy to a broad number of readers. Her brand extends worldwide through the internet. In this volume, writers analyze her positions on teen sexuality, gender, race, and politics, and the impact of Winfrey's confessional mode on mainstream television news.
The book also addresses twenty-first century issues, showing Winfrey's influence on how Americans and Europeans responded to 9/11, and how Harpo Productions created a deracialized film adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston's classic novelTheir Eyes Were Watching Godin 2005. Throughout,Stories of Oprahchallenges readers to reflect on how Oprah the Industry has reshaped America's culture, history, and politics.
eBook
Can Celebrity Endorsements Affect Political Outcomes? Evidence from the 2008 US Democratic Presidential Primary
Identifying the effects of political endorsements has historically been difficult. Before the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, Barack Obama was endorsed by talk show host Oprah Winfrey. In this article, we assess the impact of this endorsement using, as measures of Winfrey's influence, subscriptions to her magazine and sales of books she recommends. We find that her endorsement increased Obama's votes and financial contributions, and also increased overall voter turnout. No connection is found between the measures of Oprah's influence and previous elections, nor with underlying political preferences. Our results suggest that Winfrey's endorsement was responsible for approximately 1 million additional votes for Obama.
Journal Article
AMERICAN NEOCONFESSIONAL: MEMOIR, SELF-HELP, AND REDEMPTION ON OPRAH'S COUCH
This essay reads the scandal surrounding James Frey's memoir A Million Little Pieces as part of a developing brand, the American neoconfessional, and questions how memoirs, as part of this brand, present \"reading in public\" as a mode of civic engagement that teaches readers to consume and judge \"similar others.\" The redemption narrative is the preferred story in this brand, with its links to the American dream, and its promotion centers normativity as an uninspected value in life narrative. The norming of life narrative away from the complexities of racial and gendered histories of harm influences the recent shift in the memoir market toward self-help discourse. Drawing on Lauren Berlant, autobiography studies, and scholarship on Oprah Winfrey, this essay theorizes how celebrity and sentimentality intersect with nonnormative life stories and anti-confessional discourse in recent memoirs.
Journal Article
Who Will Help You to Practice Good Health Habits and Who Will Give You Eating Disorders? Analysis of WeightWatchers Twitter Network
This study explores the attributes and level of influence of Twitter users and how different types of network influencers emerge as agenda setters on WeightWatchers’ free diet program for teens. This study collected and analyzed data through the computer-assisted content analysis program and network analysis software, NodeXL. Celebrities on social networking sites were found to have greater centrality, but health advocates (against the Weight Watchers’ teens free program) also have the role of influencers. The WeightWatcher brand online community includes health advocates, researchers, activists, and non-profit organizations. While this study revealed that Twitter facilitated the emergence of a brand community sharing certain characteristics with public spheres, it also illustrates the degree to which the construction of public health frames by health advocates competes with celebrity influencers with greater levels of influence.
Journal Article
Chic Radicals: Feminism as Authenticity in Women's Popular Culture
Underwriting these claims of what women's empowerment means in contemporary popular rhetoric are: (1) assumptions about the relationship between the individual and her culture that privilege the individual, deny the strong influence that one's social and cultural context has on individual subjectivity and disparage influences from outside the self; (2) assumptions about authentic selfhood that are built on suppositions concerning the individual and her social context which maintain that the individual can discern what is authentic about herself, free from influence; and (3) the belief that finally, once in possession of this knowledge, the individual has the necessary agency to become her authentic self. Rather, the problem is in the repeated marketing of a narrative of self-discovery and self-determination by way of simplifying and trading on a complicated set of choices most middle class American women face, flattening their ethical horizons to the point where they are determined to choose between a fantasy of independence and authenticity and a reality where independence and authenticity, like everything else, are experienced in much more complex and necessarily partial ways.
Journal Article
The Power of One
(Memo to Bush family: little blond kids in suburbia are clearly being denied their constitutional right of photo opportunity!) Most white candidates, even Republicans, spend Sunday after Sunday diversifying their campaigns by preaching their hearts out in black churches, all claiming the closest of connections to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King. (This, despite the fact that the media has spent a great deal of time suspiciously scrutinizing the minister of Obama's own church for being altogether too tied to black community concerns and therefore likely mired in diuggery, muggery, and racial essentialism.) In turn, black ministers across the land were initially quite cautious about their endorsement of Obama, apologetically tentative, explicitly worried not so much about his politics but that their endorsement would be perceived as \"identity politics\" and that their voices would have more power thrown behind a more \"electable\"-meaning white-candidate, even if that white candidate was a woman, with gendered \"electability\" issues of her own.\\n And if people resent her political intervention, then we need to ask if they resent Donald Trump or Warren Buffett or Bill Gates or Michael Bloomberg-to say nothing of the average corporate lobby or oil company, whose influence dwarfs that of any individual actor.
Journal Article
Wall Street Futures Are Indicating A Higher Open This Morning As Investors Express Optimism Over U.S.-China Trade Talks, CBS
Stocks finished lower on Friday led by a decline in tech and communications shares.
Transcript
Movin' on Up: BLACK WOMEN DECISION MAKERS IN ENTERTAINMENT TELEVISION
The author analyzes the influences of black women as decisionmakers and creators in entertainment television and focuses on the effects black women have had on the system during the period 1999-2004. She also assesses whether a black presence has made a difference in the process and the products produced for television viewers. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article