Essay on Oprah: Oprah Gail Winfrey

Submitted By Signwiz
Words: 317
Pages: 2

Oprah Gail Winfrey (born January 29, 1954) is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist.[1] Winfrey is best known for her multi-award-winning talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show which was the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011.[4] She has been ranked the richest African-American of the 20th century[5] and the greatest black philanthropist in American history.[6][7] She is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world.[8][9] Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood, saying she was raped at age nine and became pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy.[10] 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,[11] she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.

Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication,[12] she is thought to have popularized and revolutionized[12][13] the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue,[12]