Clash Of The Titans: Palin Will Appear On Oprah

No hard feelings over last year's boycott I guess.

Oprah Winfrey, on a campaign to climb back from last season's ratings slump, will attempt to kiss and make up with conservative viewers on Nov. 16 when she has Sarah Palin on her syndicated talk show.

...It's not just another show booking for Oprah Winfrey. She's going whole hog this season to try to recover from the ratings tumble she took last season when her audience slid to under 7 million viewers. And, during one awful week in July, "The Oprah Winfrey Show" suffered its smallest ratings since its debut way back in 1985.

Industry navel gazers speculated Oprah had turned off some of her conservative viewers -- or, more accurately, they had turned her off -- when she not only endorsed then presidential candidate Barack Obama but even campaigned for him. (Palin, of course, was the running mate of Obama's rival, Sen. John McCain.)

It was the first time Oprah had stripped off her apolitical veneer and publicly endorsed a political candidate. At the time, Oprah told CNN's Larry King she did it because "what [Obama] stands for" was "worth me going out on a limb for."

And her ratings took a tumble, though hers was not the only syndicated show to lose audience last season and she still managed to wind up at the top of the syndication heap at season's end.

Even so, Oprah has largely abandoned her whole aspirational programming mantra this season and gone in for the more purely commercial.

Not all of Oprah's fans are happy.

So does big Obama supporter Oprah go after Palin or is it a softball fest?

My guess it's more of the latter. What's the upside for Oprah in going after Palin as if Oprah were a real journalist? If it's a ratings ploy (and it is, it always is), why lure an audience in only to piss them off?

They'll touch on some touchy stuff (Bristol and Levi, etc) but mostly it'll be light and appreciative. Then will the media go after Oprah for letting Public Enemy Number 1 off easy?

The big question is, when does Allah's dream come true and Palin appears on The View (with Meghan McCain guest hosting)?

In other TV news...Obama has been absent from TV (for him anyway) but thankfully that will be fixed tomorrow. He's doing an exclusive interview with what he seems to think is a 'real news organization', NBC.

You know NBC, the people who employ Andrea Mitchel, who doesn't think George Soros is "far left".

You see 'real news organizations' and reporters come to the defense of someone not there by interjecting their own opinion. That's journalism!

posted by DrewM. at 08:22 PM

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