Holy crap. Did someone just slag off Oprah Winfrey in a national magazine? Err... Yes, they did.

AdAge's Larry Dobrow:

I get this. Oprah hands out Pontiacs to upwardly mobile audience members; I hand out pennies and nickels to nice baristas. Oprah lavishes secondary-school educations and four-digit-thread-count sheets upon complete strangers in South Africa; I lavish Wet-Naps and unasked-for advice about girls upon my 3-year-old nephew. Oprah is a benevolent earth mother to all the little children; I am, well, me.

But with Oprah's Big Give, she's rubbing her munificent magnanimity in my face for the first time, and I don't like it. It's a rare misstep for the Big O, one in which she cranks up the do-gooder quotient to levels heretofore unseen on national TV. No, not even on Extreme Makeover: Piteous Wretch Edition.

That's the show with which ABC has paired Oprah's Big Give on Sunday nights, thus giving the less cynical among us two solid hours of people-R-fundamentally-decent affirmation set to twinkly background music. Thematically, that decision makes a lot of sense -- or at least it would have if Oprah's Big Give didn't smear a cheap reality sheen atop its for-the-cameras bigheartedness.

You have balls of steel, Dobrow. We salute you.

(Image via ABC)