The Nonsense Network: Oprah goes cable

A letter sent to PBS's On the Media:

I listened with interest to your piece on Oprah Winfrey in the Dec. 17 show. I found myself growing increasingly distressed, though. You spend the entire segment analyzing the business case for her new network and her history of financial success. This is a valid topic, but it's hardly the most important one.

Shouldn't On the Media be considering Ms. Winfrey's habit of promoting the most arrant and dangerous nonsense, pseudoscience likely to literally cause the deaths of her viewers? And isn't that topic highly relevant when she's founding a "wellness" cable network?

Some examples:
- She is giving anti-vaccination activist Jenny McCarthy her own health show. See http://www.jennymccarthybodycount.org and many other sources for information on the damage Ms. McCarthy has already done.

- She promoted the Kim Tinkham's use of "alternative" (read: non-working) therapies for her cancer, almost certainly resulting in Ms. Tinkham's death and probably the deaths of other patients encouraged to skip real medicine for wishful thinking. (http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=8745)

- Most ridiculously and frighteningly, she has tacitly endorsed "The Secret", which says that wishful thinking is all you need, that wanting something enough can make that thing happen, via its "Law of Attraction". (http://www.oprah.com/spirit/_75) This is beyond being pseudo-scientific. It is quite literally anti-reality.

So while you do a funny piece on Oprah's finances ... you ignore the fact that she promotes the most arrant of nonsense? Surely that's a valid topic for OTM? She is replacing a SCIENCE NETWORK with her balderdash, and all you can do is joke about shrinking cable audiences?

Respectfully,
Carl Fink
Long Island, NY