Oprah is starting to remind me of the scum of Wall Street that got away with huge money while the customer got screwed.
In Oprah’s case, the customer is you and me. Oprah’s work is to check out and bring us good things to read and watch.
Because of her poor research, Oprah got taken. Then she took us all for a ride.
More precisely, Oprah allowed herself to be taken.
Again.
Oprah, like many of us, often fails to do her homework.
But the lesson of credibility, often learned once some or all credibility is lost, is that to remain in high esteem in the kind of work Oprah Winfrey has chosen, one must be right most of the time.
And that means even the Queen of daytime TV has to do her homework — or just make sure her staff does theirs.
Oprah gets paid handsomely for doing her homework. She just doesn’t always do it.
Related:
Oprah’s Literary Liars Club: Who Is Responsible?
Forbes reported during 2007 that Oprah’s yearly pay was $260 Million — and that she was worth $1.5 Billion
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Oprah was, frankly, taken in by a fraud when she discovered Herman Rosenblat’s memoir, “Angel at the Fence.”
By dubbing a fraud “the single greatest love story” ever featured by Oprah, the megastar calls into question her exact criteria for greatness.
Just as Oprah was shocked to find evil behavior at her girls’ school in Africa, Oprah got a black eye on a book because she never really investigated its lineage.
The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls had Oprah’s money and Oprah’s prestige and Oprah’s cachet but none of Oprah’s supervision, direction or involvement.
And Oprah cried when she found out what was going on at her school.
Cha-ching.
Well, the buck stops here.
Oprah is a fraud.
We hope Oprah has enough sense (and time) to sort all this out and do her homework with more diligence.
People trust you, Oprah, which brings certain responsibility…..You have all the money anyone could want: now how about trying to be real. Honest. A semi-journalist.
 Photo: Getty Images |
By Richard Rusher
Peace and Freedom
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Professor Ken Waltzer, the director of Michigan State University’s Jewish Studies program, said the book “Angel at the Fence,” “was at the far end of implausibility, yet until yesterday, no one connected with packaging, promoting, and disseminating it asked questions about or investigated it. Some actively resisted such investigation and tried to shut mine down.”
By Emily Friedman
ABC News
Unfortunately for Oprah Winfrey, some stories really are too good to be true.
Herman Rosenblat’s memoir, “Angel at the Fence,” deemed by Winfrey as “the single greatest love story” she’s ever featured on her show, may now be coined by some as the single phoniest love story, after the author admitted he fabricated the story of how he and his wife met at a Nazi concentration camp.
They did not, as Rosenblat falsely wrote in the book, meet at a concentration camp during World War II, where Rosenblat claimed his wife had thrown him apples and bread over the barbed-wire fence that separated them.
In reality, Rosenblat and his wife, Roma, were set up on a blind date in New York years after the war was over.
Read the rest:
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=6543206&page=1
Related from CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/12/30/
holocaust.hoax.love.story/index.html
Peace and Freedom Global Future 
December 31, 2008 at 1:57 am |
This hoax is a tragedy. The Rosenblats have hurt Jews all over and given support to those who deny the holocaust. I don’t understand why Atlantic Pictures is still proceeding to make a film based on a lie. I also don’t understand how Oprah could have publicized this story, especially after James Frey and given that many bloggers like Deborah Lipstadt said in 2007 that the Rosenblat’s story couldn’t be true.
There are so many other worthwhile projects based on genuine love stories from the Holocaust. My favorite is the one about Dina Gottliebova Babbitt – the beautiful young art student who painted Snow White and the Seven Dwarves on the children’s barracks at Auschwitz. This painting became the reason Dina and her Mother survived Auschwitz. After the end of the war, Dina applied for an art job in Paris. Unbeknownst to Dina, her interviewer was the lead animator on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. They fell in love and got married. Now that’s a romantic love story! I also admire Dina for her tremendous courage to paint the mural in the first place. Painting the mural for the children caused her to be taken to Dr. Mengele, the Angel of Death. She thought she was going to be gassed, but bravely she stood up to Mengele and he made her his portrait painter, saving herself and her mother from the gas chamber.
Also, Dina’s story has been verified as true. Some of the paintings she did for Mengele in Auschwitz survived the war and are at the Auschwitz Birkenau Museum. The story of her painting the mural of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on the children’s barrack has been corroborated by many other Auschwitz prisoners, and of course her love and marriage to the animator of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the Disney movie after the war in Paris is also documented.
Why wasn’t the Rosenblatt’s story checked out before it was published and picked up to have the movie made?? I would like to see true and wonderful stories like Dina’s be publicized, not these hoax tales that destroy credibility and trust.