No, Oprah Is Not Dead. Stop Believing Social Media.

Oprah Winfrey is alive and well. For those of you who saw “news” on Thursday to the contrary, don’t believe it.

“Several people” received a text on Thursday that said “RIP Oprah,” a website called HITC.com claimed. The website post further said some text recipients “even took to social media” to discuss the alleged text.

“With social media slowly becoming the main source of news, it is quite frequent that death hoaxes become popular,” the vague post read. “Something similar happened when people started discussing the text they had received.”

“We would ask you to not engage with the text because it could most likely be a scam,” the post added.

Okay …

Based on the scant information in the HITC post, it’s possible that one individual sent the text. Maybe it was a joke that the person sent to a few friends or family members. Or perhaps it was a widespread text sent by telemarketers.

Welcome to “news” reporting in the year 2022.

Fortunately, only one other website — for Marca, a Spanish sports newspaper — circulated the debunked “news” on Thursday.

Oprah Says Goodbye To Her Father

To balance the scale, there actually is some legitimate news about Oprah Winfrey.

On Monday, Oprah retweeted a text from Oprah Daily about the recent death of her father.

“@Oprah’s father, Vernon Winfrey, was laid to rest last Thursday, July 14, and Lady O delivered a powerful eulogy drive the service.”

The tweet linked to Oprah’s eulogy, published Sunday, on OprahDaily.com. The story is behind a paywall accessible only to “Oprah Insiders.”

In April 2021, Oprah released a book written with Bruce D. Perry, What Happened To You?: Conversations On Trauma, Resilience, and Healing. In the book, she discussed suffering a horribly abusive childhood.

Winfrey had to sleep on the porch of the boarding house where she lived. The experience gave her “a terrified sense of loneliness that brought me to tears.” It also made her fear a kidnapper would snatch her from the porch.

Additionally, her grandmother also regularly “whupped” young Oprah “for the slightest reasons.”