Politics 2000

Oprah Winfrey will announce Friday that she’ll quit her syndicated talk show after her current contract expires in 2011, according to published reports. Winfrey has been the number-one American talk-show host for two decades.

Winfrey has 22 months left on her contract with her syndicator, King-World. She has a deal with Discovery Networks to rebrand one of the Discovery cable channels into OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network.

No one is sure whether Winfrey will resume her show on OWN in fall 2011. Rumors abound that Discovery officials told her to either commit to launching the delayed network or risk the deal being lost.

Having the Oprah Show on OWN would certainly draw attention to the fledgling channel. However, ratings have declined over the past several years. The drop has been more precipitous in the wake of Winfrey’s endorsement of and campaigning for President Barack Obama.

Winfrey has drawn as many as 40 million viewers a week. The bulk of her audience is female and many of her fans enjoy buying the products she endorses. Her lucrative contracts with stations was likely to suffer upon the next round of negotiations.

Beside the ratings slip–even though she’s still atop daytime talk–local stations are struggling during the recession. Advertising dollars are more scarce.

Therefore, the standard rich deals that included 100 percent cash upfront weren’t expected to come this time. Station general managers were expected to offer barter deals: less (perhaps no, in some cases) cash in advance and giving Winfrey’s production company, Harpo Productions, the chance to sell some of the advertising minutes and keep the proceeds.

Winfrey would be able to reap more rewards potentially by moving the show to OWN. However, she stands to lose her position as the nation’s preeminent talker if she’s on a digital cable channel many viewers don’t have.

Attorney General Eric Holder said last week five Guantanamo Bay detainees will be tried in a New York criminal court. Plenty of onlookers are outraged at the decision, partly because the trial will be conducted a short distance from the site of the former World Trade Center.

Instead, opponents argue, military tribunals held at the Cuban base are more appropriate. President Obama has faced obstacles in keeping his promise of closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

There is no political support for bringing the alleged criminals to American prisons. Deporting them to their home countries isn’t popular around the world. Funny that no nation wants to import more suspected terrorists. Even if a country would agree to take every one at the base, keeping track of them would be impossible so they’d be able to do more of what they are accused of doing in the first place.

Assuming, of course, they are guilty. The U.S. justice system is based on the concept of “innocent until proven guilty.” I hate the idea that random innocent people are arrested and thrown into jail. That’s what happens though every time someone is arrested, under the law. Doesn’t sound very different from Nazi Germany.

It’s understandable that no one would want to be assumed guilty before having the chance to defend himself in an open and fair trial. Well, as fair and open as the defendant’s wallet allows. More money typically buys better lawyers who can supply more fairness and openness.

To that end, the Canadian Supreme Court heard arguments last week over the case of a Canadian citizen who wants to be extradited to Canada. Omar Khadr wants to leave Guantanamo Bay and face a trial in Canada, if necessary. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has refused to intervene while the U.S. legal proceedings against Khadr continue.

A lower court ruled that Harper’s government must attempt to repatriate Khadr. The Supreme Court heard the government’s appeal of that ruling last week.

President Obama is in China as part of his continuing trip to Asia. He told a local university that human rights are universal rights. The president must remember while talking with the Chinese government that selling trillions of dollars worth of Treasuries into perpetuity is not an universal right. Therefore, he’ll have to walk and talk softly to his nation’s biggest creditor.

Bubble Boy’s pled guilty to one count each last week in connection with the wild goose chase on which they led America. The publicity seekers will likely be given probation.

Lou Dobbs, the longtime CNN anchor, left his job after his show Wednesday. There is speculation about whether he quit with nearly two years on his contract or was paid $8 million and shown the door. The New York Post, a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch–who also owns the competing Fox News Channel, is reporting the latter.

Either way, Dobbs didn’t have a place at CNN anymore. The network is trying to return to its roots of no-nonsense, unbiased reporting. CNN’s biggest problem is that it’s not the only 24-hour cable news network any longer. FNC, MSNBC and HLN (CNN’s sister network, the old Headline News) have taken segments of CNN’s audience.

Dobbs built his career on business reporting. His old show, Moneyline, was the standard business program on cable news. However, FNC’s Neil Cavuto developed Your World and usurped Dobbs’s audience. Dobbs left CNN for a time to focus on launching a Web site, space.com.

Upon Dobbs’s return to CNN, he changed Moneyline into Lou Dobbs Tonight. A show with according to the tagline, “news, debate and opinion.” “Opinion” was later changed to “analysis.” Dobbs never proclaimed himself “Mr. Independent” when he was the king of Wall Street news though. In short, he tried to make himself into Bill O’Reilly, the ratings leader in cable-news primetime.

Being an independent populist never seemed to fit Dobbs though and his show languished in the ratings. John King, host of the Sunday program State of the Union, will take the primetime gig starting next year.