Oprah Winfrey will make her debut on 60 Minutes for the Sunday newsmagazine’s 50th season premiere on September 24, it has been announced.
Her first story will be about America’s political divisions and she was spotted filming the segment in Grand Rapids, Michigan late last month.
Michigan was a state that voted twice for Barack Obama, but turned red to support Trump in 2016.
Oprah will make her debut on 60 Minutes on September 24 with a story about America’s political divisions
Jeff Fager, the show’s executive producer, says Oprah ‘wants to do stories with impact’.
‘She’s driven by that and so are we. That’s part of why this is such a good fit for her,’ Fager said.
Last month, Oprah revealed to Vogue that she got the job on 60 Minutes after hosting a roundtable of female Trump and Clinton supporters after the election.
‘By pressing the conversation in such a way that people could hear each other’s stories without them being politicized, I was able to get those women from different backgrounds to begin to actually hear and feel for each other,’ Oprah said of the conversation. ‘By the end of that two and a half hours, I could have gotten them to sing “Kumbaya” for real if I wanted to.’
Oprah was spotted late last month filming the segment in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She’s pictured above with some local women while out shopping in the town
After that, she says CBS CEO Les Moonves reached out to her and offered her the job, years after she turned down the opportunity originally.
‘It’s me being out in the center of the country doing that thing where you’re putting two sides together, and I am really looking forward to it,’ Winfrey said of her first story.
‘What we’re setting out to do is conquer the divide in America, try to understand it better, try to shed some light on where these differences lie,’ Fager told Vogue. ‘I think a lot of people now realize that this was one of the great missed stories of our generation — that there is so much bitterness in America today — and we really see it as something that Oprah can help us better understand, and by doing that hopefully narrow that divide and start us talking again.’
‘Oprah has so much to offer, and I think that probably she’s been a little frustrated that she hasn’t had that grand place to offer it, and I think we bring that to her,’ he added.