Oprah’s shows on the L.A. riots reveal what we’ve lost without her program

The grainy footage of the officers mercilessly beating a prone King was the nation’s first “viral video.” Thousands, if not millions, of people watched it and media companies played it continuously for months. Later, those same outlets would do the same with footage of the riots, searing the image of Los Angeles burning into the consciousness of millions of viewers around the world.

The story was so big that it even dominated daytime talk shows — a widely watched segment of the 1990s television landscape that, in contrast to news programs, tended to focus on lifestyle stories and tabloid tell-alls.

In the wake of the uprisings, one talk show host — Oprah Winfrey — brought her highly popular “The Oprah Winfrey Show” (“OWS”) to Los Angeles to cover the riots on location. The move was genius from a commercial standpoint. The show’s ratings skyrocketed as the nation tuned into emotional, gripping television that offered viewers firsthand accounts from a remarkable range of voices, some of them explaining why people were so enraged.

Looking back on these episodes of “OWS,” we can recognize how daytime talk shows sometimes made it easier for Americans to hear and see each other, nurturing empathy and a willingness to consider varied perspectives.

Before cable news had expanded beyond CNN, and before the Internet, daytime talk show hosts, including Phil Donahue, Sally Jessy Raphael, Geraldo Rivera, Ricki Lake, Montel Williams, Jenny Jones and the infamous Jerry Springer, provided significant fodder for consuming the latest controversies, trends and scandals. But, daytime talk shows also functioned as a communal watering hole where raw discussions of tough issues could lead to understanding.

Debuting in 1986, “OWS” quickly emerged as a daytime television sensation, and Winfrey, who got her start as the host of a locally broadcast morning show called “A.M. Chicago,” grew into a powerful and influential national media celebrity.

“OWS” may be best remembered for its later seasons, which were focused on living one’s best life and drew primarily White, middle-class female viewers. But the show initially reached a much more diverse audience and focused on sensational figures and scandals — like most other daytime talk shows of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In these early years, Winfrey framed her show as a town hall, where she acted as a conduit between her guests and the audience, often bouncing back and forth across the studio and stage, taking questions from anyone who wanted to pose them.

Like her predecessors in talk-show programming, Winfrey covered issues such as race and racism. In 1987, just five months after she entered the national airwaves, Winfrey traveled to Forsyth, Ga., to shoot on location in a Southern town that had, for most of the 20th century remained exclusively White and, as Winfrey noted to her viewers, “gained the reputation of being a hotbed of racism.” It’s an episode she later stated that she regretted because it gave too much of a platform to white supremacy, yet the episode set a precedent for daytime talk shows to meld the town hall-style format with on-site reporting. Winfrey, by traveling to a site of extreme racial tension in Georgia, laid the foundation for her riveting on-location reporting during the Los Angeles riots.

In April and May 1992, in the days following the not-guilty verdicts in the trial against the LAPD officers, Americans witnessed Los Angeles burning on their television screens and on front pages across the country. The images left many to wonder: Why? Winfrey, aware that her show’s format was conducive to providing answers, planned, again, to take her show on the road, this time to the riot zone.

In Los Angeles, there were no formal guests, just an audience of people who lived in the city and its surrounding areas. The audience included many who had been directly impacted by the riots and by the racism that precipitated the uprising. Winfrey offered the microphone to numerous people, allowing each to describe their perspectives and to grieve, assign blame and offer solutions. The result was a show marked by great intensity.

One Black audience member was a former LAPD officer who confessed that he quit his job because he couldn’t work for LAPD Chief Daryl Gates. “I don’t have a job right now,” he explained. “I can’t go to work because I told my boss I’m not going to tolerate the racist attitude that is perpetuated and manifested in the LAPD.” The audience gave the man a standing ovation.

Local residents sat near celebrities, including actor Louis Gossett Jr., who had won an Academy Award for his role in “An Officer and a Gentleman” and an Emmy for the television miniseries “Roots.” Gossett talked about his own experience being arrested, acknowledging that while he did not condone the violent rioting, he understood it. He suggested, “Maybe we can talk about no more double standards … and equal distribution of power.” The audience applauded Gossett as he held Winfrey’s hand and said he believed Black Americans needed both healing and reparations.

Winfrey’s audience was not uniformly sympathetic to the rioters or outraged by the jury’s verdict in favor of the LAPD officers charged with beating King. One young White woman spoke in support of the acquittals, arguing that the public had not seen the entire videotape footage from the traffic stop but the jury had. While no one saw the entire incident, another White woman rebuked her. “You don’t kick a dog 69 times,” she admonished.

Another White audience member agreed that the verdict was justified and denounced the violence among protesters. His Black girlfriend offered support, stating that she “doesn’t see color” and calling for more “personal responsibility” among African Americans.

However, the audience member who provoked the most consternation was not any one of those defending the acquittals or decrying the protests but instead a young Black man named Larry who confessed he looted during the riots. “We have no self satisfaction … I’m looking at the news and they’re telling me my life is not worth a nickel.” He contended that political actions like voting had changed nothing. Then Winfrey asked him directly if he felt better after he stole certain goods. “Definitely,” he said. “I felt 100 percent better.”

As Winfrey canvassed the studio, people in the audience continued to express their outrage and grief, spoke of losing family members and businesses. There was clapping, shouting, shushing and jeering. The audience scoffed at, booed and co-signed the statements from fellow audience members. But no matter their disagreements, each person who came to Winfrey’s microphone during those few days her show filmed in Los Angeles, represented a point on the spectrum of frustration and fantasy that Americans held — and still hold — regarding race relations.

Revisiting these shows 30 years later, as we’ve been doing on our podcast, Oprademics, exposes how the grievances that drove the uprising remain with us. Forsyth, Ga.; Los Angeles and nearly every other city in America still do not know how to live in an inclusive community. Police brutality remains. Some White people repeatedly say, “They had it coming” or “We can never know the whole truth” just as some in the “OWS” audience did that week in L.A. And, similarly, just as they tried to do on Winfrey’s microphone in 1992, Black men and women still voice their anger and distrust.

But Winfrey’s special broadcasts from the Los Angeles riot zone also remind us that something profound has changed. For as much as Americans freely engage in punditry on even the most hotly contested topics thanks to the tools provided by social media, we’ve lost our public watering hole. Daytime talk shows presented to TV viewers the image of democratized spaces in which ordinary people — not powerful public figures — claimed the microphone and dominated the conversation. Yes, daytime talk shows were highly curated spaces molded by producers, casting directors and hosts to generate high ratings. And some are still on the air. But Winfrey’s show — even when it looked like spectacle — modeled open, face-to-face dialogue and civil discourse in ways that today’s social media spaces do not.