Oprah Winfrey Show, The

The Oprah Winfrey Show was a nationally syndicated daytime talk show that aired from 1986 to 2011. Filmed at Harpo Studios in Chicago and hosted by Oprah Winfrey, the show won 47 daytime Emmy Awards and is the highest-ranking television show in American history. The Oprah Winfrey Show aired in over 150 countries and reached millions of viewers every day. Winfrey utilized the show as a platform to tackle a range of issues from fashion makeovers to diet tips and celebrity interviews and also did hard-hitting shows on child sex abuse, political scandal, and racial relations. In 2011, Time magazine named Winfrey as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Transcript

• He was born here!
• Yes, and it was confirmed again. When it first came up, were you thinking, ‘I hope I was born here’?
• Well, can I just say, I was there so I knew I’d been born there. I remembered it. During the course of this major debate where I gave a big speech and the Republicans voted on their proposal, the biggest news was this birth certificate thing.
• The birth certificate.
• And so at that point I said to my team, ‘Look, even though this is not usually what the State of Hawaii does, even though the Republican Governor of Hawaii, the Democratic Governors of Hawaii, all the various officials had confirmed that I was born here, let’s ask them for a special dispensation where they will go ahead and provide us with the original to see if we can put this to rest.’ We are living in a very serious time and America has huge potential and opportunity to seize the 21st century. We are only going to get there, though, if we have a serious conversation about the things that matter to people.

Oprah Winfrey was born in 1954 in Mississippi, where she lived during her early childhood years before moving to Milwaukee to live with her mother. After a turbulent adolescence, Winfrey moved to Tennessee to live with her father. At age 17, she won the Miss Black Tennessee pageant and a scholarship to Tennessee State University, where she majored in speech communications and worked at a local African American radio station, WVOL. At 19, Winfrey became the first African American woman and the youngest person to anchor the Nashville evening news.