Oprah Winfrey has more to worry about these days than just her flailing TV network.

The former talk show queen’s self-named magazine is also suffering a significant sales drop, according to The New York Post:

Newsstand sales plunged to 413,363 copies — down 32 percent from the same period a year ago, when she was selling 608,212 copies.

Winfrey’s last syndicated talk show aired in May 2011, so while there has been some softness for the past two years, this marked the first six-month stretch with no broadcast TV exposure at all. The magazine’s total circulation was also down by 5 percent, to 2,380,782.

Combine that with the dismal ratings for OWN, Winfrey’s upstart network, and you have a picture of a media titan in trouble.

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Everything’s not coming up Rosie for the former Queen of Nice.

Rosie O’Donnell’s new OWN talk show is still struggling to find its audience. So the minds at Oprah Winfrey’s nascent network decided to start the new year with a fresh executive producer and set.

Shane Farley, who worked with O’Donnell on her previous Emmy-winning syndicated talker, The Rosie O’Donnell Show, has come on as executive producer … Farley has more than 15 years of experience producing talk shows, most recently Rachael Ray. The Rosie Show kicked off 2012 with a new smaller and brightly-colored set. It fits about 70 audience members, about a fifth of the original set, and is inspired by Rosie’s art studio at her home in New York….

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It wasn’t long ago that Oprah Winfrey and Rosie O’Donnell represented two of the most beloved personalities on TV.

O’Donnell was the reigning Queen of Nice for her sweet as pie talk show, and Winfrey’s power was so vast she could hold up a book on camera and make it an instant best seller.

Then each decided to share their political views with their audiences after years of being mostly apolitical, and their careers haven’t been the same.

Winfrey wholeheartedly backed then-Sen. Barack Obama for the presidency in 2008. O’Donnell, freed from the constraints of her touchy, feely show, ranted her 9/11 truther conspiracies on “The View.”

Now, both are having trouble drawing a crowd on OWN, Winfrey’s much ballyhooed new network. Winfrey’s new talk show garnered only a fraction of the ratings her old talk show drew. And O’Donnell’s “The Rosie Show” isn’t faring any better.

Coincidence?

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The Queen of Nice is now the Queen of Low Ratings.

Rosie O’Donnell’s OWN talk show is hardly helping Oprah Winfrey’s new network overcome its ratings woes. “The Rosie Show” quickly dropped 49 percent after its debut in October, and given the network’s overall lousy performance it doesn’t seem to be having a positive impact on the rest of the lineup.

The press appears disinterested in O’Donnell’s fall. Shouldn’t a celebrity with a track record of talk show triumphs – both on her own syndicated program and as part of the successful gab-fest “The View” – be a safe bet for a home like OWN?

Could it have anything to do with O’Donnell’s vitriolic transition from fuzzy talker to 9/11 truther?

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Rosie O’Donnell is one of the most toxic, divisive, polarizing, and disliked celebrities on the planet. She’s also too dumb to know fire melts steel. In summation, Rosie’s not a lifesaver, she’s an anvil.

Oprah must really be desperate:

NY Post:

Media mogul Oprah Winfrey announced that once again, she is “happy to be of service to Obama in 2012,” which proves that some people just don’t learn, and Oprah is one of those people. It also means that, regardless of the extent of the damage Obama has inflicted on employment, the economy, and the future success of the American people, the same voters affected by the President’s disastrous first term may very likely vote for him again.

All around, Obama’s negative influence is so severe that even gazillionaire Oprah Winfrey has not been immune to the “Obama Effect,” where people who were working in 2008 are either no longer employed or are concerned about what effect his continued presidency may have on job security.

Since Obama won the Democrat presidential nomination in June 2008, the employment rate has soared from 5.8% to as high as 9.8%. The President’s policies are so toxic to the workforce that a 31-year-old Ohio breakfast restaurant he touted as an “indirect beneficiary of the government’s Chrysler bailout” closed after he made a passing mention of the establishment’s success in a speech.  One word from Obama and Chet’s omelet machine began collecting dust. (more…)

From Reuters:

Oscar organizers on Friday downplayed speculation that former talk show queen and Oscar nominee Oprah Winfrey might be hosting Hollywood’s top film honors next year.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that Winfrey, who ended the “Oprah Winfrey Show” in May to run her OWN cable TV network, has emerged as a top candidate to host the Academy Awards in February.

The Sun-Times, citing unnamed sources inside the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, said organizers think Winfrey’s presence would expand the show’s audience and, given that her talk show ended only recently, they believe she will lure her legions of fans to the 84th Oscar show in February. (more…)

CHICAGO (AP) – In the end, it was just Oprah.

For the final episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” taped Tuesday, the talk show queen appeared alone on her Chicago stage, talking to viewers about what they’ve meant to her during the show’s 25-year run. The finale will air on Wednesday.

Fans leaving Tuesday’s taping said Winfrey had tears in her eyes as the television icon said a final thank you.

“She said, ‘This isn’t goodbye. This is until we meet again,” said Amy Korin, 32, of Chicago, who was in the audience.

Winfrey then kissed and hugged her longtime partner, Stedman Graham, and made her way through the halls of Harpo Studios, saying goodbye to her staff, audience members said. She kept saying, “We did it! We did it!,” Korin said, and giving employees high-fives.

There was a single chair on the stage, but Winfrey stood most of the time, audience members said.

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When Piers Morgan was chosen to succeed Larry King at CNN, liberals believed his (overplayed) British persona might finally be the ticket to cutting into Sean Hannity’s domination of the same time-slot at Fox News.  After all, Morgan is a man of the world with all the open-mindedness mainline liberalism can promise while Hannity is a man of this nation who’s not ashamed to be mentioned in the same sentence with close-minded “bigots” like Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin.

Looking at things on paper, it appeared it wouldn’t be long before Hannity would be forced to come begging and pleading for a menial position on Morgan’s staff.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the actual squaring off of Morgan’s show with Hannity’s: namely, Morgan’s guest lineup betrayed the fact that he believes the American people want to spend another hour of their night watching Hollywood elites get tossed softball questions by a host who’s consumed with reminding us he came here from across the pond.

In other words, to date, Morgan’s plan to beat Hannity includes interviews with Oprah Winfrey, George Clooney, and Kim Kardashian, among others. When we consider the fact that Hannity’s offerings have included salt-of-the-earth folks like Sarah Palin and down to earth commentary from the ever-present “Great American Panel,” it’s little wonder that Morgan is getting shellacked in the ratings. (Yes, Morgan is beating MSBNC’s Rachel Maddow, but that’s no feat.) (more…)

UPDATE: Feeling the heat, Behar backtracks, takes “bitch” back. In other news, Behar helps power Angle’s fundraising efforts to unseat Reid.

How will television’s living symbol of ex-wifery respond to Oprah Winfrey’s rebuke? Joyless Behar can’t fire back, by her own twisted worldview that would be racist.

Hollywood Reporter:

Don’t expect Oprah to go down market on her network OWN, launching in January.

In a speech at Maria Shriver’s Women’s Conference, she said her cable net will be “fun and entertaining without tearing people down and calling them bitches. Imagine that. Imagine.”

Over to you, Barbara Walters…

Super Bowl ads have become a competition themselves and are often better than the game. At a reported cost of over $3 million for a thirty-second spot it would be hard for me to imagine that any of the ads are cost effective but it’s not my money, so roll the tape!  Judging from some ads there are either a lot of advertisers who don’t want conservatives to buy their products or a there are a lot of liberals making television advertisements.

Qualcomm’s combined leftist ideology and male bashing in its two ads featuring a guy who is “spineless” and a heavy political video montage by Obama idolater Will.i.am. I guess his stage name is supposed to be clever but it makes me think he was just raised on a little too much Dr. Seuss. Can you imagine the flack a company would get if it let Ann Coulter or Glenn Beck produce a video montage for its Super Bowl commercial? Watch the above clip for visuals of everything from Castro to Al Gore “winning” Florida.

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Some lives slip through the cracks, people who you might pass everyday without giving a second thought. Precious is one of those people.

Vastly overweight and carrying her second child at the far-too-young age of 16, Precious is an African-American girl living in the Bronx who’s stuck four years behind her age group in the 7th grade, with a single mother who is verbally, emotionally and physically abusive towards her. Her father is only in the picture enough to come over and rape her, which led to her first child being born with Down Syndrome, and Precious utterly unaware of proper prenatal care or even a delivery date for her second.

The only thing that brings her any sense of joy is her imagination, which Precious uses to block out horrific moments of the past and present with visions of herself on red carpets and other glamorous situations. But when a school official steps in and orders her to go to an alternative school for troubled young women, a concerned teacher, social worker and eventually a male post-natal nurse discover the extent of Precious’ problems and help her take the drastic actions needed to save her life. (more…)

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The sweet pretty things are in bed now of course. The city fathers, they’re trying to endorse, the reincarnation of Paul Revere’s horse. But the town has no need to be nervous. The ghost of Belle Starr, she hands down her wits, to Jezebel the nun, she violently knits. A bald wig for Jack the Ripper who sits, at the head of the Chamber of Commerce.

Mama’s in the factory, she ain’t got no shoes. Daddy’s in the alley, he’s lookin’ for food; I’m in the kitchen with the tombstone blues. “Tombstone Blues” – Bob Dylan

Perhaps the sudden death of pop icon Michael Jackson had many Hollywood stars contemplating their own future obituaries. But the industry, which has been strongly committed to promoting the dangers of man-made global warming, was strangely silent on the Waxman-Markey bill which squeaked though the House last week. The United States economy, i.e., actual real human beings who live in America, continues to suffer from the enormous Obama-lead government’s allocation of resources by massive deficit spending and taxes. The axis of deception changes with each specific fiscal proposal. (more…)

He is a man with a gun. He is a killer, a slayer. Patient and gentle as he is, he is a slayer. Self-effacing, self-forgetting, still he is a killer. . . All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. — D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

Every once in awhile an action film comes along that revives. That proves that — no matter how strong the political correctness of an age, no matter how pale and pathetic its notions of masculinity, no matter how much Ritalin is force-fed to little boys, no matter how many toy guns, xylophone mallets, and Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots get banned from stores and playgrounds — there are certain aspects of the male soul that are inviolate, and certain primal yearnings that are evergreen. Taken (2008) is one of those films, and its release last week on DVD and Blu-ray should be heralded by lovers of all things red-blooded, hairy-chested, and morally sound.

When this movie appeared in the doldrums of Hollywood’s off-season, it was expected to die a quick death in a marketplace filled with audiences either too sophisticated or too sophomoric to respond. Modern theatergoers, the theory goes, increasingly want their “heroes” to be either brooding Abercrombie & Fitch nymphets like Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, feckless stumblebums like Ben Stiller and Paul Blart: Mall Cop’s Kevin James, quirky class cut-ups like Robert Downey Jr. and Johnny Depp, or silly video-game tough guys like Jason Statham, Vin Diesel, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. When an actor does put some honest testosterone in his performance — Daniel Craig in Munich (2005), Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino (2008) — it’s inevitably to make a much larger point about violence breeding only more violence, all of it equally reprehensible, a product of way too many pesky males wreaking havoc in primitive bursts of knuckle-dragging temper. (more…)

Elizabeth Edwards has hit the chat show circuit to hawk her new memoir “Resilience.”  Her interview with Oprah airs Thursday.  Elizabeth has some important lessons to teach the young women of today.  The most important of these lessons is to be nothing like her, though I’m pretty sure that’s not the message she is trying to send.

Typically, when someone whines about his or her circumstances, I take a common sense approach and start by blaming the victim.  The fact is that bad things tend to happen to people who make bad, or at least dumb, decisions.  No money?  You’re probably not working hard enough.  Dead end job?  You probably didn’t get an education.  Creepy husband who cheats with a trampy party girl and humiliates you in front of the entire nation?  You probably chose to marry and stick with a creepy husband who would cheat with a trampy party girl and humiliate you in front of the entire nation. (more…)

Jackie Kennedy did it graciously.

Hillary Clinton did it grudgingly.

First Ladies have reinvented themselves into softer, gentler, more user-friendly versions of their former ornery selves since the dawn of TV. But none has done it so radically and dramatically – and quickly – as Michelle Obama, relaxing the arches of her disturbingly angry eyebrows, covering her naked upper arms, and putting a figurative muzzle across her disapproving lips. She has emerged, butterfly-like, as vacuous and silly as any chick you’d meet in a shopping mall. And she’s performed this metamorphosis with the expert encouragement of your friendly neighborhood celebutard, Oprah Winfrey. (more…)

Filmmaker Tyler Perry, with Oprah Winfrey as a role model, has consistently outsmarted Hollywood moguls since his debut feature Diary of a Mad Black Women. That Gospel-infused “fat-suit-in-drag” comedy was made for a mere $5.5M and scored an opening weekend of $21.9M, ultimately generating $50.6M in domestic sales.

The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well with Tyler Perry

At only 39, Perry is building an empire. He officially christened Tyler Perry Studios last October in Atlanta with a star-studded event. The multi-million dollar project is a sprawling 30-acre working production facility in southwestern Atlanta, and the opening night party featured appearances by legendary African American actors like Sidney Poitier, Cicely Tyson, Ruby Dee, Lou Gossett, Jr. and Will Smith.

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