Culture News Blog

She is, for the fifth time, numero uno on the Forbes Celebrity 100 list.

She is the world's most famous black billionaire, proprietor of a groundbreaking daytime talk show, two magazines, a cable TV network, a reality show, an influential website, a hit Broadway musical, numerous movies and television specials and a satellite radio show.

There's her Soul Series webcast, the South African leadership academy for disadvantaged girls and a subdivision of new houses built by her Angel Network in Katrina-ravaged Mississippi.

But here's guessing you're not surprised there are signs of cracks in the cult of Oprah.

According to Nielsen ratings, The Oprah Winfrey Show has recorded three successive years of declining ratings. The circulation of her flagship magazine, O, The Oprah Magazine, has dropped 10% in the past three years and Oprah's Big Give fell flat on its philanthropic face.

Simply put, Oprah has lost her middle-class mojo, especially now that she's consumed not with talking to us about the way we live, but with talking to us about the way she thinks we should be living. Her relentless proselytizing about self-improvement is getting on our nerves.

And so are her disciples: Rachael Ray and her earnest recipes, Dr. Phil and his blowhard badgering, Dr. Mehmet Oz and his diseased lungs in a bag and Eckhart Tolle and his flash-of-the-blindingly-obvious New Earth truisms.

There's no denying that Harpo Inc. is a hugely successful and altruistic conglomerate, built solely by an ambitious black woman who rose above poverty and abuse and was astute enough to find a vacuum in North American culture that needed filling. But after 22 years, there is tedium in the air.

The slide began, a few years back, with her increasing emphasis on new-age spirituality and her sledgehammer conversion tactics. If imploring us to find our 21st-century inner God wasn't enough to make us dull normals switch over to The Ellen DeGeneres Show, along came Barack Obama, and he represented one tricky conundrum for the influential Winfrey.

Should she support the Democratic presidential candidacy of the black man, who, like her, overcame racist roadblocks and is blazing a historic path, or should she support the presidential candidacy of the white woman, who, like her, overcame sexist roadblocks and is blazing a historic path?

She chose Obama, a decision interpreted as something of a betrayal by the millions of predominantly white middle-aged urban professional women and new generation stay-at-home moms who make up her core audience, who made her the media mogul she is today, and who, for the most part, support Hillary Clinton. And, who, it now appears, are tuning out.

True, there is little imminent danger that Winfrey will be falling off her pile of gold any time soon -- Forbes cites her worth at US$1.5-billion, and her TV numbers are still impressive at nearly 7.3 million.

Oprah Winfrey is not going away any time soon, but there remains the nagging question: Would anyone miss her if she did?

FP Headline News delivered each day at noon by Financial Post's Alia McMullen.

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