The challenges in Oprah's career
- Oprah is found to sometimes be too upfront with her opinions, as well as comes off as bossy, such as when she had talked back to Steven Spielberg on the set of ‘The Colour Purple’. She can sometimes be a manager X, and sometimes Y, as her attitude changes very often and easily towards different aspects of her business.
- She is very stuck on her own past sometimes, especially with the loss of her newborn son when she was a teenager. She often forgets to let go of her past by talking about it too much and begin focusing on her future.
- Oprah sometimes gets too arrogant about her work, and some mistake it for thinking too highly of herself. She always mentions how she will and already has it 'all', which sometimes might make others too jealous of her success and want her to fail.
- Oprah tends to get too involved in the lives of the people whom she interviews, she gets very emotional and sometimes it becomes unprofessional of her to confess to her life problems rather than helping others understand theirs.
- She had been accused of lying about her past, with her mother and sisters saying that she wasn’t an unfortunate kid, and in fact got almost everything she had wanted. This questions her credibility.
- Her main weakness is her eating disorder, which is the only aspect of life she has yet to conquer and be the queen of. She has never been able to get rid of her weight constantly going up and down.
- ‘The Color Purple’, was criticized much for the racism that was shown in the movie, which affected Oprah as she starred in this controversial film. It was said to portray that black men are not to be trusted, and have only bad intentions. Many lost their respect for Oprah.
- Her relationship with Stedman Graham has ended poorly, with him spreading rumors about her allegedly getting him into ‘crazy drinking, sex, and drugs’, claiming she had gotten him addicted to doing cocaine.
- Oprah tends to produce very controversial shows, which allow people to sometime question wether they support her or not. This had happened when she decided to have O.J. Simpson, the famous killer, on her show in 1997.
- Her childhood had been very rough, as she supposedly says she had almost nothing growing up. This was a very big weakness in the process of becoming who she is now, and had taken a lot of falls to get to the point of success she is at currently.
- Oprah tends to do publicly good deeds, but when it comes down to the reality of the deed, it had been unreasonably planned. For example, when she had decided to give everyone in her audience a free car, or so it seemed in the show. It turned out that every single person in the audience was stuck paying $7,000 of taxes in the expense of the car, regardless if they had that amount of money to spend or not- they were not given much of a choice.
- Oprah was said to have gone 'too far' after producing an episode on her show about autoerotic asphyxia, an extremly dangerous way of masturbation possibly leading to death. Minutes after this episode had aired, a 38-year-old man decided to try out this theory and ended up accidentally killing himself. Oprah was blamed for this awful tragedy and was sued by the parents of this unfortunate man.
“I don't believe in failure. It is not failure if you enjoyed the process.”
-Oprah Winfrey