Oprah a clear winner of royal interview
LOS ANGELES — There were royal victims and villains in Harry and Meghan’s tell-all — or tell enough — interview with Oprah Winfrey. But there was only one immediate and clear winner: the American media queen.
While the couple drew both strong support and rebukes for detailing why they fled Britain and their royal roles, Winfrey burnished her stature as a master interviewer with Sunday’s special that rivaled “The Crown”’ for drama and heartache.
She was in her element, breaking news and making entertainment. In past big “gets,” Winfrey had grilled Lance Armstrong about doping, Whitney Houston about her troubled life and Michael Jackson on whether he’d lightened his skin to deny his Blackness.
In those encounters, Winfrey played prosecutor or mother confessor. This time, she asked the couple holding hands in a manicured California garden to reveal the sins of a monarchy with 1,200 years of history.
The answers, including claims of palace bigotry and callousness that Meghan said put her on the brink of suicide, reverberated with U.S. viewers and in the U.K. Hugh Jackman recommended the “courageous interview” for its candor about mental health, and Serena Williams praised her friend Meghan for being “so brave.”
Winfrey carefully framed the interview’s legitimacy at the outset, asking Meghan to confirm that questions hadn’t been provided in advance, no subject was off limits and the couple wasn’t compensated. CBS reportedly paid Winfrey’s production company, Harpo, up to $9 million to air it.
“The thing that struck me first and I think will stay with me the longest is that she began the interview” with ethics-related disclosures, said Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of WisconsinMadison. “That was such a fantastic way to be transparent about what we were going to see in that interview last night, and how we as viewers can judge its credibility.”
Winfrey also pointedly noted that she had attended the couple’s wedding — thanking Meghan for the invite — and that they were neighbors in the posh Montecito area of Southern California.
The veteran interviewer, actor and media mogul had a willing partner in Meghan. Looking moviestar glamorous yet vulnerable in her visible pregnancy, the former “Suits” actor came prepared to “speak your truth today,” as Winfrey put it at one point.
When Meghan revealed the depth of her emotional distress, however, she stopped short of confirming that she considered suicide. Winfrey guided her toward that bleak revelation with a deftness honed by long experience.
Her questions were short and direct, including this memorable query to Meghan: “Were you silent, or silenced?” A careful listener, she let nothing escape her notice, including when Harry almost offhandedly mentioned that his father, Prince Charles, stopped taking his calls. Winfrey coaxed Harry to explore the rift.
Meghan said in one of the interview’s bombshells that someone in the palace, whom the couple refused to identify, had speculated on how dark Meghan and Harry’s then-unborn son, Archie, would be.
“What? Hold up,” a shocked Winfrey replied.
John Doyle, television critic for Canada’s The Globe and Mail newspaper, said Winfrey was “the best kind of person” for the job.
While she is “a media superstar, incredibly rich and successful,” Doyle said, she’s able to view the British monarchy as a representative American who’s fascinated by it.
“I think she played that role and did it very well,” he said.