Enough with James Frey.

[Q Classic]

Seriously. I cannot tell you how sick I am of hearing the media ***** about this complete and utter non-issue.

He's already had his manhood snipped and returned to him by Oprah. Now that his publisher and his book agent have made their money off of him, they're dropping him. I almost feel sorry for this lightning rod of a guy. Frey's been fried.

With all of the media hubbub, there's all this bull**** sanctimonius crap about "truth" and "honesty" over a fecking memoir.

It's a book. It's a book that really only became popular because a Queen of Pop Culture blessed it on her show, sending out millions of brainwashed twits to buy it like good little consumers.

I'm sorry, if you're so ****ing shallow to be conned into buying a book based on its placement on a special list, you have jack **** to complain about.

I'm sick of ****ing hearing about it. I really am. It's as much a media-generated, artificial non-issue as Terry Schaivo was.

[Dinner]

Never heard of him.

[Gatekeeper]

YEAH! You f*cking tell 'em, Q! Kick azz, man! (And, seriously, I do agree with you ... but, heck, your OP just, well, I was swept up in the moment, honestly!)

Gatekeeper

[Pekka]

Jon Stewart had an interesting view on it, it was funny, I hope you caught it.

Yeah, this is one of those who cares, let's move on. The dude made up some things, OK, but is it really THAT evil? Punishments should meet the crimes, and his crime wasn't deserving of this penalty if you ask me.

I hope he made lots of money from this though.

[Saras]

Who?

[Datajack Franit]

who who who?

[DRoseDARs]

Douchebag. Embellished minor inconveniences that happened to him (or more often, to others) or simply made sh*t up and passed his book off as a true autobiography of how he turned himself around. Duped Oprah. The Smoking Gun called him on all his bullsh*t. Oprah defended him. Oprah saw that no one was believing his sh*t anymore. Oprah said she was duped.

Whoodie-frickin'-doo *spins index finger in the air*

[Pekka]

So exactly where in this world this news is this important that it has gotten all this attention? Someone wrote a book with lies in it. Wow. Huge deal.

[Wycoff]

I agree with you, Q... this entire incident was IMO a product of Oprah's ego moreso than Frey's general douchebaggery.

[Elok]

Better for him to get publicity than the other Frey. I hate the Eagles.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by Wycoff
I agree with you, Q... this entire incident was IMO a product of Oprah's ego moreso than Frey's general douchebaggery.

Yep. If Oprah wasn't involved, this story would be a one day deal.

[MrFun]

So we're tired of this guy, yet SOMEONE on here had to make a thread about him, nevertheless.

[Ming]

It's a sad... sad... sad... world

THE OPRAH-FREY FRAY IN NUMBERS
In Which We Discover, Sadly, Everybody Seems to Win
February 02, 2006
QwikFIND ID: AAR36Z
By Ann Marie Kerwin
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Looked at with a cold dispassionate eye, Oprah Winfrey’s takedown of fabricating author James Frey on her Jan. 26 talk show should have warranted, at most, a blip in the news last week. But that’s not, as we all know, what happened.

The talk-show host, who had chosen Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces” memoir for her influential Book Club and thus boosted him onto the bestseller list, apologized to viewers for recommending a book that the Smoking Gun Web site later proved had significant incidents that were largely made up. So just who comes out the big winner? It seems just about everybody.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Between the morning of Jan. 26, the day that Oprah dressed down Frey on her show, and the evening of Jan. 30, 167 references to the showdown appeared in major publications, as defined by the Factiva news-search tool. That includes front page articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Google’s Zeitgeist rated “James Frey” as No. 4 for the week ending Jan. 16 (above Martin Luther King). “Smoking Gun” was rated No. 9 for the week ending Jan. 9.

Internet searches for the term “james frey” skyrocketed 452% over the previous week for the week ending Jan. 14, when the Smoking Gun broke the story over the author’s falsehoods, according to Hitwise, an online market research firm that measures searches across all search engines. Searches for “a million little pieces” were up 293%.

The week the story broke, Amazon.com was the leading site receiving traffic from searches from the search term “a million little pieces,” followed by “Random House” -- the book’s publisher -- and Oprah.com. Hits to book sites across the Internet using the author’s name or book title spiked during the week of Jan. 14.

“Whether the truth was embellished or not, people loved the book, and the controversy will only serve to sell more copies,” LeeAnn Prescott, Hitwise senior research analyst wrote on her blog accompanying these statistics.

The buzz over the James Frey controversy attracted traffic to both Oprah’s Web site and TheSmokinggun.com. Visits to Oprah.com for the week ended Jan. 22 climbed to 1 million from 926,000 the previous week. TheSmokingGun.com, which is owned by Court TV, experienced the second-highest number of page views it had received in its nine-year history. The Smoking Gun accounted for more than 70 million page views in January -- an increase of more than 50% over both January 2005 page views and average monthly page views for all of 2005, the site said.

"The Oprah Winfrey Show" for Jan. 26 won’t have official Nielsen ratings available until next week, but her average household rating in January was a 6.8, or about 8.8 million total viewers. Early read from some of the data available to Harpo Productions, producer of Oprah’s show, and its syndicator, King World, is that it will be the highest rated show for the week of Jan. 20 with an expected 7.4 household rating.

But that doesn’t take into account who watched it online. Youtube.com members had posted excerpts of Oprah frying Frey by Jan. 28, and in three days, those clips had already been viewed 18,547 times.

So how’s disgraced James Frey doing? As of Jan. 30, “A Million Little Pieces,” widely reported to have exceeded total sales of 3.5 million copies, was No. 5 on the Amazon.com book list. By Feb. 1, it had moved down to No. 6. (The only book in 2005 that outsold Frey’s tale was the magical and equally fantastic “Harry Potter.”)

For the week of Jan. 30, “A Million Little Pieces” was No. 1 on Publishers Weekly’s list of The Books Most Borrowed in U.S. Libraries: Nonfiction, its fourth week appearing on the list. And “My Friend Leonard,” Mr. Frey’s sequel, was still sitting at No. 3 on the Hardcover Nonfiction bestseller list. “A Million Little Pieces” was also still appearing as No. 2 on Publishers Weekly trade paperback bestseller list, having been in the No. 1 position for 17 weeks. And which book unseated it to grab the No. 1 slot? Oprah’s next Book Club pick, Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” also, not so coincidentally, the No. 1 best-seller on Amazon Feb. 1.

~~~
Contributing: Nat Ives, Abbey Klaassen and Kris Oser

In the end... big money all around for everybody... sigh...

[Q Classic]

MrFun, I didn't make a thread on him so much as a thread *****ing about the media, once again.

The media doesn't have the balls to make issues when they're important, but when it's pointless televised masturbation, everybody in America needs to see it on the major news networks.

In the words of Jon Stewart, James Frey misled us into a book we had no business getting into.

[MrFun]

So don't buy the book already!!!!


Frankly, I have no interest in the issue myself -- I just ignore it, rather than get my blood pressure up to an unhealthy level.