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Oprah Winfrey Reveals the Surprising Reason She Left ’60 Minutes’

Apr 30, 2019  •  Post A Comment

Oprah Winfrey reveals in a new interview that she is “no longer doing” the CBS show “60 Minutes” and explains that her decision had something to do with how the show wanted her to say her name.

In an in-depth interview with Winfrey published today by The Hollywood Reporter, she was asked about “the cultural reckoning that’s going on,” with interviewer Lacey Rose pointing out that “60 Minutes” has been “rocked by its share of #MeToo incidents.”

But Winfrey suggests she already had the wheels in motion for her exit before most of that went down, adding that the CBS show “was not the best format for me.”

Pressed for details, Winfrey says: “How should I say this? Never a good thing when I have to practice saying my name and have to be told that I have too much emotion in my name.”

Rose then asks, “I take it that didn’t sit very well with you?,” to which Winfrey responds:

“No, it’s not that it didn’t sit very well. I did it. I think I did seven takes on just my name because it was ‘too emotional.’ I go, ‘Is the too much emotion in the “Oprah” part or the “Winfrey” part?’ I had a deja vu moment because I’ve actually lived through this once before when I covered a story as a young reporter [where] the family had lost their home and my boss told me that I reported it with too much emotion. I had too much emotion in the story. I thought, ‘OK, so you’re not supposed to be involved in the story, I get that. You’re a journalist.’ But the same thing is true even with a read [at ’60 Minutes’]. They would say, ‘All right, you need to flatten out your voice, there’s too much emotion in your voice.’ So I was working on pulling myself down and flattening out my personality — which, for me, is actually not such a good thing.”

We encourage readers to click on the link above to THR to read the full interview.

5 Comments

  1. Oprah was on 60 Minutes?

  2. Diiiiiidn’t even know her being there was a thing

  3. What a prima dona !!!!

  4. Translation: there were not enough Ding Dongs and Cookie Dough Ice Cream in the break room at CBS.

  5. Oprah is great because she’s authentic. So tired of people trying to put others in a box, they clearly hired the wrong person. Lara Logan, on the other hand, is completely over the top with her reads, hard to watch 60 minutes these days.

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