Discovery board doesn’t hear a lot about Oprah

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Discovery Communications’ board of directors held its quarterly meeting today but anyone looking for news about Oprah Winfrey and her cable network was sorely disappointed.

While some of the cable programming giant’s top executives made glowing presentations to the board, neither Winfrey nor her svengali Tom Freston were anywhere to be seen around Discovery’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Md. Not even Christina Norman, chief executive of the Oprah Winfrey Network, made the cross-country trek for the meeting. That seems slightly unusual given all the attention around the network.

Apparently there is little to update on the OWN, hence a song-and-dance from Winfrey, Norman or Freston wasn’t seen as necessary. At this point, though, isn’t the fact that there is little to update about the channel worth an update? The place has had a revolving door of executives and has been vague on its programming plans. Discovery has already pushed the date of the launch back several times. (Before some Discovery or OWN rep picks up the phone to scream, Webster’s defines several as ‘an indefinite but small number.’)

For now, OWN is not saying when it will launch, but already it seems very unlikely that it’ll happen in the first six months of next year. There have been many executive shuffles and very little programming in the works so more time will probably be needed to get it off the ground. And then there are those who think ultimately that this channel will never fly.

Much of the channel’s fate hinges on Winfrey, who is keeping quiet. Her move last week to dispatch one of her top executives -- Lisa Erspamer -- to Los Angeles to work on OWN set off speculation that Winfrey herself was thinking of moving her daytime talk show to OWN. Winfrey’s current daytime TV contract is up in 2011.

A Discovery spokeswoman declined to comment on the board meeting.

-- Joe Flint