Matt Drudge links to a piece by Margo Howard on Kitty Kelly’s new biography of Oprah, which explores why the legacy media is giving Kelly the cold shoulder:
There is a serious backstory to the story of O. The first thing you need to know is that there was great surprise in the publishing world that such a book could even be done. Oprah, being the doyenne of making or breaking books, was thought to be immune from an unauthorized biography because … well, she is the doyenne of making or breaking books. Kitty Kelley was probably the only author whose name and track record could convince a publisher to take the leap. (And we’re not talking Grace’s Storm Door and Publishing Company; we’re talking Random House.)
Kelley is generally thought of as an “Uh-oh” writer. That is, when she announces she is writing a book about X, the response is “Uh-oh,” usually on the part of the subject. For the rest of us, the “Uh-oh” signifies: “This is gonna be good. It may be down and dirty, but it will be true, and it will be good.” If there is hidden history to be gotten, Kelley will get it. Some people belittle her work as muckraking that is perhaps fanciful, if not far-fetched, but that is because they can’t believe that there are facts about a famous person which have heretofore not been known. Let’s put it this way: Frank Sinatra, when she was writing her book on him, was so, um … displeased that he threatened to have her killed. And she’s never been sued successfully. For her biography about Oprah, she did 850 interviews. Eight hundred and fifty! (In my news days if I contacted four people I thought I had really worked my tail off.) Her work is that of a hybrid researcher/historian, and whatever she writes you can take to the bank. She is in no way an academic, which is probably the reason her books sell in the millions.
The second thing you need to know about this book is that most of the kingpin interviewers in the mainstream media were astonishingly up front about saying they would not help Kitty promote her book because they didn’t want to offend Oprah! They didn’t even make up excuses; they flat-out said they didn’t want to offend Oprah. It was surprising, to say the least, that interviewers such as Larry King, Charlie Rose, David Letterman and Barbara Walters all shut her out.
The Orwellian role of the modern media is to keep information bottled up. To keep the news to themselves, to coin a phrase. Politically, the legacy media moved in lockstep in 2008 to not cover (keep rockin’!) the John Edwards scandal, while concurrently, nary a discouraging word was heard about an ambitious young senator named Barack Obama who was running for the presidency, since the media shared the politics of both men. In the previous decade, Matt Drudge’s bones were made when Newsweek didn’t want to report on Bill Clinton’s peccadilloes for similar reasons. Back when they all hosted the evening news, Tom Brokaw and the late Peter Jennings defended Dan Rather against all charges in the fall of 2004 in the scandal that gave Pajamas Media its name.
Given that they share the same profession (not to mention the same politics) as Oprah, why would anyone, at this late date, be surprised about this?
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