Cohen, who says he's a huge Oprah fan, booked Winfrey for an interview on "CBS This Morning" and wanted her to take part in an interview for a weeklong series he was doing featuring talk show hosts of the time. Winfrey said yes to the first but no to the second. Cohen, however, asked the production team to keep the cameras rolling after the first interview and for Paula Zahn, the interviewer, to simply segue into the second interview. (Cohen says Zahn was unaware that Winfrey hadn't really agreed to the second interview). "Dear reader, I was not living my best life," Cohen wrote. "I recall this now with a mix of total shame." After the second interview happened, Winfrey called from her car phone, and Cohen answered. "I lost all professionalism, and also full sight of the fact that she probably hadn't phoned to chat or congratulate me for anything," he wrote. "I began hyperventilating... I sputtered and screamed. Had I won a trip!? 'Calm down, Andrew,' Oprah said. 'Calm down.' And I did. I guess she was used to calming down hysterical people." Winfrey wasn't pleased about the second interview, but allowed it to be aired.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
