[First published in AM New York]
IN HER BROADCAST TODAY, OPRAH WINFREY is doing something unusual for a talk-show host. She’s showcasing her own acting performance in ABC‘s “Desperate Housewives.”
But then, Winfrey is noted for doing the unusual. Who would have thought a TV book-club would ever succeed, let alone deliver such a slap to America’s bemused publishers.
She once showed up on the set of PBS‘s reality series “Colonial House,” breaking all the rules that locked its participants into the 17th century.
Chief Executive Alex Graham of the Wall-to-Wall production company didn’t like his series’ conventions being defied, but he sure liked the publicity Winfrey brought to the show.
Winfrey has also been doing something that even network news divisions and cable news channels haven’t done much. Her daytime show has reported the horrendous, seemingly endless civil war in the Congo.
With the help of special contributor Lisa Ling (pictured above with the host in a lighter vein) Winfrey delivered stark numbers – the dead in that African conflict now total nearly 4 million.
The two American TV women introduced this coverage in a bold segue from previous footage, also compelling, from tsunami battered Thailand.
No effort was made to compare the two disasters. But Oprah did say that much attention has been devoted to Asia’s crisis and rightly so, while little notice is paid to what she called in some frustration this “atrocity of humanity in Africa.”
She recalled for me the journalist’s inadequacy that I felt a few years ago while staring across the broad, slow-flowing Congo, wondering if the horrors that river has witnessed could ever be fully appreciated on the banks of the Ohio, Missouri or Hudson. There’s an extra twist in that challenge to our journalistic mission to explain – the need for conveying fully human wretchedness in one suffering region – when another suddenly seems to claim all our attention.
Tony Blair went further than Winfrey and headlined Africa’s appalling death rates from war and disease with a direct comparison to Asia: “There is the equiva lent of a man-made, preventable tsunami every week in Africa.”
This year Blair holds both presidencies of the G8 coun tries and the European Union, and will surely aim his Don’t-Forget-Africa message at the American government and people as well.
The U.N.’s head of communications, Under Secretary-General Shashi Tharoor, told me: “As an Asian myself, I am impressed by the world ‘s solidarity with the tsunami victims. But I really hope it won’t come at the expense of people suffering from the ‘perpetual tsunamis’ of poverty, drought, famine and disease elsewhere inthe world, particularly in Africa.”
