A woman born in 1954, has become a SELF MADE billionaire, role model, icon, and superstar. This woman's name is Oprah Winfrey. Since fifth grade, this woman has been a huge inspiration to me because her actions are very selfless and she is into entertaining others. Oprah Winfrey is an actress, director, producer, journalist and a philanthropist. She has legitimately changed the world with her success story and what she has done with her success has really defined her career. Because of all her success, she now has her own network on television called The Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN).
Oprah gained her fame during her show, "The Oprah Winfrey Show" on ABC. I know it may be strange for some men to admit they watched The Oprah Winfrey Show but I have no shame admitting it. I used to watch it all the time with my mother and it really inspired me; now I want to be just like her. Nowadays, journalists don't have a degree besides some of the ones on the news. Many talk show hosts have not studied the art of broadcast journalism but do have the talents to pull it off. This is one of the things that separated Oprah and other talk show hosts; Oprah has her degree in communications and has worked her way up in the industry by herself. She didn't have a huge career before her show to land her a talk show, her talent was the talk show. Other talk shows have been successful but "The Oprah Winfrey Show" aired for 27 years (one of the longest running talk shows), and has 47 Daytime Emmy Awards which says a lot about these other talk shows.
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With the success of her talk show and more fame, Oprah saw a pathway gain more success and basically, make some more money. Through this, she also saw a new outlet to help people with all this fame and money as well. Just to name a few of her actions to help others, Oprah has a school in South Africa for girls, her famous car giveaway during her talk show, and supporting over 20 charities. Through this, she has become a true philanthropist.
CNN and TIME have called Oprah, "arguably the world's most powerful woman." This was mainly because of her style of interviewing. Oprah was in a field, at the time, that was dominated by white males, so she had to stand out in what she was doing on television. Her curiosity and her fearlessness while she interviewed stars and asked questions really helped her stand out and become one of the most well-known journalists. She also had a good sense of empathy while interviewing. She wasn't shallow and she didn't treat celebrities like they were some other entity or they weren't a person. Be it a celebrity or not, she treated those whom she interviewed like an exceptional human being but didn't lose sight of the truth which viewers loved to see.
Now running her own network on television with her own line of tv shows, she has basically made an empire out of the television industry. She has been in her prime all her career and has definitely made a pathway for others especially women, to run their own empires and get to the top of the industry. Her career has encouraged other female journalists to become just as big and change the game in making the minority at the top. Lastly, Oprah has been a huge influence on me and is definitely one of my first role models.
