Oprah gets taken to task for embracing junk science
After Oprah Winfrey’s 7 January Hollywood speech ignited nationwide conjecture about a presidential candidacy, the Los Angeles Times headlined a column by Pulitzer-holder Michael Hiltzik with a question: “Will President Oprah bring her quacks with her to the White House?”
Criticism appeared from science defenders elsewhere in the media too. The online health-sciences magazine STAT summarized :
Oprah Winfrey has had indisputable influence over public health knowledge. Millions of people watched Winfrey every day for decades. She has a monthly magazine with her face on the cover. She has had a cable television channel, a satellite radio station, and a sweeping online presence. But at times, Winfrey has given a platform to people who promote medical treatments and health advice that aren’t based in evidence.
Does quack science tarnish a presidential candidate in a celebrity age? Criticism has come from both right and left. National Review published “President Oprah’s pseudoscience: Her record is actually quite alarming.” Similar articles appeared at the Federalist and the New York Post . A Wall Street Journal op-ed indicted Winfrey for conferring visibility on promoters of anti-vaccine hysteria.
Oprah Winfrey speaks at a 2014 event.
aphrodite-in-nyc, CC BY 2.0
At Slate , it was “Oprah’s record of promoting charlatans should perhaps give us pause about her impending presidency.” Similar articles appeared at the Washington Post and Mother Jones . Vox detailed “Oprah’s long history with junk science.”
Much of the criticism targets the vaccine-hysteria charge. Winfrey’s TV show ended in 2011 after 25 years, but it regularly gave a platform to the anti-vaccine activist Jenny McCarthy. Winfrey’s production company even signed McCarthy for her own talk show. Most articles quote McCarthy’s crystallizing statement about her son, whose autism she attributes to a routine vaccine: “My science is named Evan, and he’s at home. That’s my science.”
Winfrey also gets criticized for conferring visibility on Phillip “Dr. Phil” McGraw and on Mehmet “Dr. Oz” Öz. STAT says Winfrey started Dr. Phil toward becoming TV’s highest-paid daytime personality—and emphasizes that a recent STAT–Boston Globe investigation found that far from rescuing addiction victims, he puts some at risk. In 2014, a Los Angeles Times report marveled that Dr. Oz “didn’t even have the grace to squirm” when facing a Senate subcommittee concerning weight-loss scams. The BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) debunked Dr. Oz’s health misinformation.
Most of the criticism carries over from past years. This month’s conjecturing about a presidential candidacy only revives it.
In 2006, a New York Times piece indicted Winfrey for publicizing allegedly questionable cosmetic procedures. In 2009, under the headline “Why health advice on ‘Oprah’ could make you sick,” Newsweek disapprovingly quoted Winfrey’s defense of actress Suzanne Somers, the object of criticism for promoting questionable and even bizarre self-help health measures. “She’ll take on anyone,” declared Winfrey, “including any doctor who questions her.”
In an attempt to define the spirit of Winfreyism, Newsweek also addressed Winfrey’s connection to the film and book The Secret :
This perpetual search for The Answer reached its apex a couple of years ago, when Oprah led the frenzy over The Secret. The video and accompanying book were a rehash of one of the oldest of self-help truisms—"think positive”—refreshed with a dusting of “science.” The secret of The Secret was something called the Law of Attraction. As Oprah put it on the show, “It says that the energy, that the thoughts and feelings that you put out into the world, both good and bad, are exactly what is always coming back to you, so you have the life that you have created.” Oprah and the teachers of The Secret, as they call themselves, did not mean this metaphorically. They explained that the universe and everything in it are made of vibrating energy, and by thinking positively we can actually “attract” the positive vibrations of the universe and bend them to our will. “You’re a field of energy in a larger field of energy,” one of The Secret’s teachers said. “And like attracts like, and that’s very, very scientific.”
By harnessing this powerful science, they said, we can have anything we want—happiness, love, fabulous wealth. This was so inspiring to Oprah that she devoted three shows to the product and appeared on Larry King to talk it up more. She said it encapsulated everything she believes. “I’ve been talking about this for years on my show,” she said. “I just never called it The Secret.”
In 2011, a New York Times commentary declared that Winfrey led a “cult, which is at once Christian and pantheistic.” The author charged that “in her earnest spiritual seeking,” Winfrey conferred visibility on questionable figures—for example, the “psychic medium” John Edward “to help mourners in her audience talk to their dead relatives.”
In 2015, Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman, professing longtime fanhood for Winfrey, commented under the headline “Dr Oz, and how Oprah’s weakness for crackpot theories tarnishes her legacy.” She invoked a long 2013 New Yorker piece debunking Dr. Oz, TV satirist John Oliver’s 2014 TV segment bitterly mocking him, and a 2015 CNN article quoting 10 physicians’ accusation that he shows “an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments.” The column squarely blamed Winfrey for Oz.
It’s worth mentioning that some of Winfrey’s efforts have proven helpful for the medical field. For example, last year she starred in the HBO film The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which is based on science writer Rebecca Skloot’s best-selling book. Winfrey led behind the scenes in pushing for the movie, which tells the story of a poor, cancer-stricken African American woman in the 1950s whose cells were cultured without her consent to form the now-ubiquitous HeLa cell line. “All of this has gotten people talking about the previously obscure world of research with discarded biospecimens, the parts left over after we undergo surgeries, biopsies and blood tests,” wrote bioethics researchers Holly Fernandez Lynch and Steven Joffe in an April 2017 New York Times op-ed .
As of 17 January, Oprah hasn’t seemed bothered by the threat of bogus science tarnishing her presidential prospects: Materials promoting anti-vaxxer McCarthy’s views still appeared on Winfrey’s website.
Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today‘s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.