The hometown newspaper has a message for Oprah Winfrey, and it isn't just about grifting celebrity endorsements. That's certainly the framing used by the editorial board in blasting the billionaire media mogul, but the real issue for the editors hits much closer to home.

The trouble started when Oprah put on a glitzy show that she called an "interview," but which was much more of a "variety show," as David put it at the time.  Oprah wasn't the only celebrity for this supposed town-hall event; Bryan Cranston, Chris Rock, Ben Stiller, J-Lo, Julia Roberts, and Meryl Streep joined in the glitz and glamour:

Oprah Winfrey introduces the Hollywood elites joining tonight’s Harris campaign virtual rally: pic.twitter.com/j3iYoDopXE

— Conservative War Machine (@WarMachineRR) September 20, 2024

After all of the celebrity shout-outs, Oprah then did a Hollywood version of an "interview" with Kamala Harris, which had all of the hallmarks of an A-lister infomercial. David covered this well at the time, but the main takeaway from the interaction was that Harris was inept even at softball pseudo-interviews even under the most sympathetic conditions imaginable. 

That turns out to be the Trib's main complaint too, but we'll get to that. As it turns out, these pseudo-town halls cost money, and lots of it. Oprah Winfrey has hotly denied that she personally got paid to endorse Harris, but the campaign shelled out a million dollars to Winfrey's Harpo Productions for that mid-September infomercial. Winfrey says that money went to the production costs and not her personally:

In a TMZ video, Winfrey herself denied that she was paid, and she followed up with a response to a comment in The Shade Room, in which she also defended the sum paid for the production.

“Usually I am reluctant to respond to rumors in general, but these days I realize that if you don’t stop a lie, it gets bigger. I was not paid a dime,” Winfrey wrote. “My time and energy was my way of supporting the campaign. For the live streaming event in September, my production company Harpo was asked to bring in set design, lights, cameras, crew, producers and every other item necessary (including the benches and the chairs we sat on) to put on a live production. I did not take any personal fee. However, the people who worked on that production needed to be paid. And were. End of story.”

No, that's not end of story. Why would it take a million dollars in production costs to put on a one-hour infomercial for the campaign? And why charge for it at all? Granted, it would have to be structured that way to avoid the implications of an in-kind campaign contribution, which would be limited to $3300 if it went directly to the candidate. However, if Winfrey had done it for the joint victory fund partnership between Team Kamala and the DNC, that upper limit goes to $926,300, according to FEC regulations. That should have been more than enough room to pay the workers without draining funds donated by voters.

The Chicago Tribune's editors wonder about that too:

Campaign reports indicate the Harris campaign paid Harpo $1 million to handle the event. In total, those campaign reports indicate, the Harris campaign spent more than $15 million on “production fees.”

It’s true that production workers need to be paid and that’s fair enough; they’re not donors. And, frankly, $1 million is not all that much to Winfrey and so we very much doubt that she was seeking any kind of personal payday from her chosen candidate. But she does own Harpo and serves as its chairwoman and CEO. The production fees should have been a campaign donation.

I'd guess that the two $500K payments more than covered the production costs, too. Maybe not, but that production didn't look like anything close to a million bucks, unless they were paying the audience to cheer Harris, which would be even more embarrassing. Winfrey may not have gotten paid directly to endorse Harris, but she got paid nonetheless.

But again, that's not the main beef that the Tribune editorial board has with Oprah, even though their headline focuses on the "check." They accuse her of using that infomercial to shield Harris from real journalists with real questions:

Better yet, rather than do such events, the Harris campaign would have been better advised to let its candidate answer questions from independent journalists and give her more of a chance to explain herself and lay out her plans for America’s future. Celebrity osmosis did not work; voters wanted to hear more about what Harris would do for them.

That's exactly right. Oprah deliberately set that infomercial in place to create a grotesque burlesque of transparency. It was a clown show of even a town hall, events which are mainly cooked anyway with pre-approved questions presented by -- but not originating with -- audience members. This was Oprah trying to present herself as a journalist while trying her best to promote Harris rather than test her. That way the Harris campaign could claim that Kamala answered substantive questions from the "media" as an excuse for ignoring actual journalists. 

And it failed, too, which raises questions about whether the campaign even got its money's worth out of the effort. Harris was no more coherent with Oprah than she was on 60 Minutes even with CBS News editing her answers, and only slightly more responsive than Harris was in the Fox News interview she did out of desperation. Ironically, ABC's attempt at an infomercial on The View probably doomed Harris when Sunny Hostin stumped Harris with the obvious question of what she'd do differently from Joe Biden. Instead of being prepared to answer that, Harris wrapped her arms around the deeply unpopular status quo. 

Oprah earned every bit of the Tribune's opprobrium. She certainly got paid for it. 

Addendum: Oprah deserves this criticism from Megyn Kelly, too. If this was a legit interview/town hall event, why was the candidate paying for it in the first place?

This is highly irregular. The subject of the interview does not pay for the set/production costs (the interviewer does) & even more shocking when said costs are $1Mil. Esp shady when it’s a presidential candidate.
This is grossly unethical. https://t.co/NM6hLox7J8

— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) November 15, 2024

Answer: Because it was an infomercial for a product Oprah wanted to flog, that's why.