On Show With Frey, Journalists Stress Value of Truth
Oprah Winfrey, saying “I feel duped and that you betrayed millions of readers,” secured an acknowledgment today from author James Frey that he had fabricated parts of his memoir about addiction in a riveting live broadcast of her television show. The show included journalists Richard Cohen, Frank Rich and Roy Peter Clark asking for a rededication to the value of truth in publishing and in society.
“We have to believe in truth. It has to be reflected in publishing as well as in journalism,” said Clark, who is vice president, senior scholar and reporting on the writing and editing faculty of the Poynter Institute.
He noted that Winfrey’s subsequent Oprah’s Book Club selection, Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s account of his time in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, is being published at a time when heads of state “are saying the Holocaust never happened,” and thus there must be no doubt that the book is completely truthful. So many lies are told in government and elsewhere, said Rich, columnist for the New York Times, that publishers and others in such positions must uphold it as a value.
“I do believe that telling the truth can set you free,” Winfrey said to Frey at the end of the hour-long program. “All you have to do is come clean, for your sake.” Frey had said he thought of the people in his memoir as “characters.” Winfrey also said “I deeply regret” leaving the impression during a call to “The Larry King Show” that “the truth doesn’t matter. The truth does matter,” she said repeatedly.
To Cohen, who had criticized Winfrey in his Washington Post column, she said, “Thank you very much. I was wrong.” Cohen had written Jan. 17 that Winfrey “is not only wrong but deluded. What she needs is a session with Dr. Phil.”
Also taking lumps was Frey’s publisher, Nan Talese, senior vice president of Doubleday. She maintained on the show that no red flags leaped out at her or her staff and that a memoir is merely the author’s recollection of events. “As an editor, do you ask, ‘are you as bad as you say you are?'” Talese said. “Yes!” Winfrey replied. Cohen, who said he was a friend of Talese, said a fact-checker could have found untruths in the book in half an hour.
Talese said new editions of the best-selling book, “A Million Little Pieces,” would include an author’s note saying portions of the book have been changed.
It was noted immediately on the listserve of the National Association of Black Journalists that New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch was the only journalist of color to appear, though until 1984, the billionaire entrepreneur was in the news business herself, as a news personality at Baltimore’s WJZ-TV. Crouch, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and Joel Stein, Los Angeles Times columnist, were shown in sound bites criticizing Winfrey’s continued support of Frey.
By way of background, “Frey’s story of substance abuse and recovery became one of the best-selling books of 2005 after Winfrey named it to her book club last fall, with countless addicts citing it as inspiration. It was originally published in 2003,” as Karen Hawkins wrote for the Associated Press.
“The memoir began to unravel earlier this month when an investigative piece on The Smoking Gun Web site (http://www.thesmokinggun.com) challenged some of the facts in the book, including Frey’s assertion that he once spent three months in prison.
“Frey, 36, appeared on CNN’s ‘Larry King Live’ show after The Smoking Gun story appeared, and Winfrey phoned in her support for him and for the book, calling the allegations against Frey ‘much ado about nothing,'” Hawkins reported.
As Winfrey’s show aired, “We were sitting here with our jaws dropping,” William Bastone, the editor of The Smoking Gun, said, according to Patrick T. Riordan, writing on the Chicago Tribune’s Web site. “That opening statement,” in which Winfrey confronted Frey, saying she felt duped, “was remarkable. That was an unbelievable piece of television.”
“The Smoking Gun staff was able to watch the entire show in their New York office, and Bastone said Winfrey’s battering of Frey didn’t let up,” Riordan continued. “It was brutal,” Bastone said in the story. So brutal, in fact, that, “at the end, you felt bad for Frey.”
Winfrey said on the show that she defended Frey in her Jan. 11 call to King “because I love the message of this book and — at the time, and every day I was reading e-mail after e-mail from so many people who have been inspired by it. And I have to say that I allowed that to cloud my judgment. And so to everyone who has challenged me on this issue of truth, you are absolutely right.”
“If I come out of this experience with anything, it’s being a better person and learning from my mistakes and making sure I don’t repeat them,” Frey said at the show’s conclusion.
- Michael Conlon, Reuters: Frey admits fictions, Oprah apologizes
- Dave Wischnowsky, Chicago Tribune blog: Did Frey use Oprah again?
