Oprah WinFrey

James Frey reminds me of a little boy caught in a lie, trying to get the smallest punishment possible. Oprah reminds me of the cave-in mother who knows she should ground the kid for life, but ends up letting him do whatever he wants the next day.

And both of them are loving it.

Neither Oprah nor James have been ultimately hurt by this. James has secured a spot in literary history as the man who lied in memoirs - and got caught. Oprah will be forever known as owning up to a mistake, and confronting her defamer. If I didn't know better, I would have thought Oprah was a politician by the way she demanded regulation by the publishers and spun the story in her favor.

This is a classic case of any publicity being good publicity. Frey will sell even more copies of his book, despite the controversy, because we have no problem reading his book as fiction. Most people were pretty taken by the story, and it doesn't matter what the cover says: "memoir", "almost a memoir", "fiction based on reality..."

Hmmmm...

Perhaps that's an even better point. Why are we mad at Frey for shifting our perception of his life away from reality, when movies have done that for a very long time as well? Movies that state they are "fictional but based on actual events" shape how we perceive the actual events. And usually these events are more important the drug-addicted life of James Frey (i.e the life of JFK or Vietnam or Johnny Cash).

We've made James Frey a pretty big scapegoat for lies here. I can think of a certain someone whose lies have perpetuated the death of thousands, a disillusioned country, and false ideals of democracy. When is Oprah going to sit him down and give him a stern lecture?