The Los Angeles Times is in the midst of running a four-part series on the United Farm Workers. The series is thorough, detailed and engaging. Just when the paper looks like it can do nothing right, it pulls this out. All of the Google News of the world simply cannot completely replace this level of investigative journalism.

Not to be outdone, the Smoking Gun showed that Internet-only sites are also capable of investigative reporting with their expose of James Frey “A Million White Lies: Exposing James Frey’s Fiction Addiction.” Oprah Winfrey will no doubt be employing damage control now that it is clear how duped she was into promoting Frey’s book. On an October show, Winfrey said this about Frey’s book:

“(It’s) like nothing you’ve ever read before. Everybody at Harpo is reading it. When we were staying up late at night reading it, we’d come in the next morning saying, ‘What page are you on?’” In emotional filmed testimonials, employees of Winfrey’s Harpo Productions lauded the book as revelatory, with some choking back tears. When the camera then returned to a damp-eyed Winfrey, she said, “I’m crying ’cause these are all my Harpo family so, and we all loved the book so much.”

The part she left out is “Oh, yeah, it’s all made up too!”. The Smoking Gun conducted a six-week investigation into Frey’s claims and found them to be exaggerated and/or fabricated.

It will be interesting to see how this shakes out. Oprah has amazing power when it comes to promoting books and she went into overdrive promoting Frey and the book.

According to a Washington Post article that came out around the time that Oprah picked his book, he is working on a screenplay on the life of Hells Angels leader Sonny Barger, supposedly for director Tony Scott and Fox 2000. He also made this comment about being in Oprah’s circle:

“Once you’re an Oprah writer,” he said, “you’re an Oprah writer for life.”

I wouldn’t count on that.

Update: As Michelle says: “Just one more reason to despise the victim lit genre.”

Update: Oprah tries to put a lid on the scandal by saying that some things in the book may have actually happened.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 10th, 2006 at 10:20 am by Insider and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.