Oprah Winfrey quits 60 Minutes: They told me I was "too emotional" in the way I said my name

The Hollywood Reporter

"I've removed myself from that, so I have only 85 jobs now," Oprah tells The Hollywood Reporter, adding that she left the CBS News magazine, which she joined in 2017, before the scandal that saw the ouster of executive producer Jeff Fager last year. "It was an interesting experience for me," she says. "I enjoyed working with the teams, and I'm probably going to work with some of the freelance people on my Apple stuff, but it was not the best format for me." Why not? "How should I say this? Never a good thing when I have to practice saying my name and have to be told that I have too much emotion in my name," she says. Oprah adds: "No, it's not that it didn't sit very well. I did it. I think I did seven takes on just my name because it was 'too emotional.' I go, 'Is the too much emotion in the "Oprah" part or the "Winfrey" part?' I had a deja vu moment because I've actually lived through this once before when I covered a story as a young reporter (where) the family had lost their home and my boss told me that I reported it with too much emotion. I had too much emotion in the story. I thought, 'OK, so you're not supposed to be involved in the story, I get that. You're a journalist.' But the same thing is true even with a read (at 60 Minutes). They would say, 'All right, you need to flatten out your voice, there's too much emotion in your voice.' So I was working on pulling myself down and flattening out my personality — which, for me, is actually not such a good thing."