Attention, any one of the 22.5 million people that watched The Oprah Winfrey Show yesterday, when she shocked viewers when she introduced her long-lost half-sister Patricia --whom she's known about since November, 2009-- in order to boost her ratings and ad-rates going into the March mini-sweeps ratings period:
You. Were. Exploited.
Indeed, you: Women who are only 15 years older than their first child, gay men, those who celebrated President Obama's extension of unemployment benefits and work-at-home humour writers were sucked into the Oprah-vortex, where this billionaire once again exploited a member of her family for attention and ratings.
She's known about this sister, Patricia --a single mother of two, had been thrown away with the trash in Milwaukee by their mother, Vernita Lee, in 1963-- for well over a year. I don't know, but if one of my siblings popped out of the woodwork, and I truly had a need to reveal them to an international audience, I wouldn't wait until it would benefit my career. I wouldn't've sent out a press release to generate mystery and buzz. And I wouldn't drag my dear sister into a sh-tstorm she is ill-equipped to handle.
AND Oprah sent out another press release after the show aired, the text of which follows:
"Determined to find her birth mother, Patricia -- whose last name was not revealed on Monday's show -- said she first discovered her familial ties in 2007, but kept the news to herself to protect Winfrey's privacy."
"Since I have been a person known in the public, there have been few times that I've been anywhere and not been sold out," Winfrey told Patricia while choking back tears. "There have been few times where you can bring anybody new into your life and not have that person in some way betray you or use you or take advantage of you."
"Patricia tried and tried and tried again to get responses from my mother and other people in the family. She never once thought to go to the press. She never once thought to sell this story," she continued. "When I heard this about you, I said, 'Regardless if it's true or not true, I had to meet you because I wanted to meet somebody who had that kind of character.' So thank you.'"
She quotes herself in her own press release! WTMF?!?!
Isn't it interesting that it is written exactly like a news article, knowing that lazy-ass reporters would just cut-and-paste it, versus writing something new and original? Skunks!!!
Oprah is scum; a self-important witch who hit the appealing-to-the-peasant-mentality lottery, converted that into a self-promotion, billion-dollar empire, and still finds it necessary to trick her followers into jumping through mindless hoops, just because she can.
Go away, Oprah. Soon.
