Media Falls for Race Hoax? Swiss Clerk Brands Oprah a Liar

A Swiss sales assistant caught in the middle of Oprah Winfrey’s media racial firestorm claims that she’s tired of being bullied and lied about by the powerful billionaire and cable network owner. Speaking anonymously, the sales clerk Oprah has publicly accused of racism for not showing her a $38,000 handbag told a Sunday newspaper, “It is absolutely not true that I declined to show her the bag on racist grounds. I even asked her if she wanted to look at the bag.”

This directly contradicts an anecdote Oprah relayed to Entertainment Tonight  in which she told America that the clerk’s response to her request to see the handbag was, “No, it’s too expensive.”

The racially-charged headlines and media frenzy that followed were many, and mostly unskeptical.

Eventually the shop owner and the entire of country of Switzerland would apologize to Oprah. The shop owner, however, has always claimed that the incident was a major misunderstanding that had nothing to do with race.

For its part, the American media never showed the moral courage to express any skepticism towards one of the most wealthy and powerful people in the world. The story was just too good, I guess, and Oprah just too much of a sacred cow–a close friend of Barack Obama’s, black, leftist, an actress, and a woman.

But did the media even wonder for a moment how a potentially exaggerated, racially-charged anecdote of this kind might help to sell Oprah’s upcoming film, “The Butler?” It was, after all, during the publicity blitz for “The Butler” that Oprah first told the story.

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