It's Oprah's World

Jeff Bercovici is on vacation. Guest blogger Sean Elder submits:

I was just about hit by a bus bearing an advertisement with a likeness of Oprah Winfrey, who has begun an all-new season of her syndicated talk show—and that was before I got home and read that she made four times as much as any other TV star.

That math came off a list of the best-paid TV stars released by Forbes yesterday. Oprah made $260 million between June 2006 and June of this year; her distant number two was Jerry Seinfeld who scraped by with a lousy $60 mil.

Oprah, of course, not only owns and produces her own shows; she owns a piece of Dr. Phil's and Rachel Ray's shows, as well. (Those Oprah protégé's made the Forbes list too, with earnings of $30 million and $16 million respectively.)

And this figure does not reflect her earnings as a magazine and book publisher, Broadway producer etc. (She is No. 53 on the magazine's list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, valued at $2.5 billion.)

One thing that struck me about the TV list was the preponderance of daytime talent represented in the top twenty. There's Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters ($12 million each); Matt Lauer ($13 million); Ellen DeGeneres ($15 million); Regis Philbin ($21 million); even Judge Judy ($30 million, no less). Primetime may be more prestigious but if you want to make money, let the sunshine in.

Finally, most of these people aren't funny. There's Seinfeld (who makes his fortune from residuals); No. 3 David Letterman ($40 million); and No. 6 Jay Leno ($32 million); and Ellen, I suppose. (If you said "Regis," I should have said, "Intentionally funny.") But for the most part we can conclude that a box full of tissues, and perhaps a bit of tough love, is worth at least four times what a puffy shirt and a bee suit can bring.

Whatever you think of Oprah (and having been published in her magazine and one of her books, I think she's swell), you can't deny her mastery of many domains. She pretty much single-handedly kept The Color Purple alive on Broadway; did more for book publishing than anyone save Harry Potter; and even rewrote the rules of the memoir by making James Frey atone for fudging the line between fact and fiction.

You're either on her bus or you're off it.

by Sean Elder