ALEXSON HAWELL PISMP JUNE 2014

OPRAH WINFREY

Oprah Gail Winfrey (born Orpah Gail Winfrey; January 29, 1954) is an American media
proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. She is best known for her
talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was the highest-rated television program of its
kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011. Dubbed the "Queen of All
Media", she has been ranked the richest African-American, the greatest black philanthropist
in American history, and is currently North America's first and only multi-billionaire black
person. Several assessments rank her as the most influential woman in the world. In 2013,
she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama and
honorary doctorate degrees from Duke and Harvard.

Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised
in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She has stated that she was molested during her
childhood and early teens and became pregnant at her son died in infancy.Sent to live with
the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still
in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her
emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime-talk-show arena, and
after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own
production company and became internationally syndicated.

Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication,she is

thought to have popularized and revolutionized the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil
Donahue, which a Yale study says broke 20th-century taboos and allowed LGBT people to
enter the mainstream. By the mid-1990s, she had reinvented her show with a focus on
literature, self-improvement, and spirituality. Though criticized for unleashing a confession
culture, promoting controversial self-help ideas, and an emotion-centered approach, she is
often praised for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others. From 2006 to
2008, Oprah Winfrey's endorsement of Barack Obama, by one estimate, delivered over a
million votes in the close 2008 Democratic primary race.
Spiritual leadership

In 2000, she was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP. In 2002, Christianity Today
published an article called "The Church of O" in which they concluded that Winfrey had
emerged as an influential spiritual leader. "Since 1994, when she abandoned traditional talk-
show fare for more edifying content, and 1998, when she began 'Change Your Life TV',
Oprah's most significant role has become that of a spiritual leader. To her audience of more
than 22 million mostly female viewers, she has become a postmodern priestessan icon of
church-free spirituality."The sentiment was echoed by Marcia Z. Nelson in her book The
Gospel According to Oprah. Since the mid-1990s, Winfrey's show has emphasized uplifting
and inspirational topics and themes and some viewers say the show has motivated them to
perform acts of altruism such as helping Congolese women and building an orphanage. A
scientific study by psychological scientists at the University of Cambridge, University of
Plymouth, and University of California used an uplifting clip from The Oprah Winfrey Show in
an experiment that discovered that watching the 'uplifting' clip caused subjects to become
twice as helpful as subjects assigned to watch a British comedy or nature documentary.

In 1998, Winfrey began an ongoing conversation with Gary Zukav, an American spiritual
teacher, who appeared on her television show 35 times. Winfrey has said she keeps a copy
of Zukav's The Seat of the Soul at her bedside, a book that she says is one of her all-time
favorites

On the season premier of Winfrey's 13th season, Roseanne Barr told Winfrey "you're the
African Mother Goddess of us all" inspiring much enthusiasm from the studio audience. The
animated series Futurama alluded to her spiritual influence by suggesting that "Oprahism" is
a mainstream religion in 3000 AD. Twelve days after the September 11 attacks, New York
mayor Rudy Giuliani asked Winfrey to serve as host of a Prayer for America service at New
York city's Yankee Stadium which was attended by former president Bill Clinton and New
York senator Hillary Clinton.[158] Leading up to the U.S.-led 2001 invasion of Afghanistan,
less than a month after the September 11 attacks, Winfrey aired a controversial show called
"Islam 101" in which she portrayed Islam as a religion of peace, calling it "the most
misunderstood of the three major religions". In 2002, George W. Bush invited Winfrey to join
a US delegation that included adviser Karen Hughes and Condoleezza Rice, planning to go
to Afghanistan to celebrate the return of Afghan girls to school. The "Oprah strategy" was
designed to portray the War on Terror in a positive light, however, when Winfrey refused to
participate, the trip was postponed.

The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls - South Africa is a girls-only boarding
school that officially opened in January 2007 in Henley on Klip near Meyerton, south of
Johannesburg, South A. Inspired by her own "humble beginnings" and disadvantaged
background, Oprah Winfrey stated that she founded the Leadership Academy to provide
educational and leadership opportunities for academically gifted girls from impoverished
backgrounds in South Africa who exhibited leadership qualities for making a difference in the
world. The current headmistress is Ms. Anne Van Zyl who has been at the academy since
2010. In August 2009, two of the students from the school, Debra and Marwiya, were
selected to represent South Africa in the Women2Women America International Leadership
Conference in Boston U.S.. Only 88 students from around the world were chosen to attend
the event, and only 44 countries were represented. South Africa was one of only three Sub-
Saharan African countries that won representation at the conference, with the other two
being Uganda and Sudan. The two students won representation for South Africa in an
essay-writing contest."We had to write an essay about women issues in South Africa. I was
ecstatic when I was told that my essay was chosen," explained 16-year-old Debra who wrote
about teen pregnancy, gender inequality and domestic violence.The two students agreed
that highlights of their trip to the U.S. were meeting rapper Jay-Z and watching the musical
Wicked on Broadway.

Building houses

In the fall of 2010, 225 of the Academy's students partnered with the non-profit organization
Habitat for Humanity to build 11 low-cost houses over two days for disadvantaged families in
Orange Farm, south of Johannesburg. The girls mixed cement, laid bricks and toiled on the
different building site and places