Oprah will be announcing tomorrow that she is ending her daytime talk show after a 25 year run.

Oprah Winfrey will announce Friday that she’s giving up her popular daytime show when her contract ends in Sept. 2011.

“We have the greatest respect for Oprah and we wish her nothing but the best in her future endeavors, we do know anything she turns her hand to will be a great success,” said a spokesman for the CBS Television Studios, which distributes her show, which airs on ABC in New York.

“We look forward to working with her for the next several years, and hopefully afterwards as well.”

Winfrey’s team Thursday notified stations that carry the show, along with other companies connected to Harpo Productions that the decision was made. Locally, WABC/Ch. 7 broke the news on air and on its Web site.

“Tomorrow, Oprah will announce live on ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ that she has decided to end what is arguably one of the most popular, influential and enduring programs in television history,'” Harpo president Tim Bennett said in the letter, which told stations to share the news.

“The sun will set on the ‘Oprah’ show as its 25th season draws to a close on September 9, 2011.

Clearly, there’s no confirmation of this until tomorrow, so let’s take it with a grain of salt. But let’s consider how this will “change the landscape of television”. Her ratings have been falling and Ellen Degeneres has taken her spot as the queen of daytime TV. Frankly, I couldn’t be happier. To me, Oprah represents a lot of what is wrong with this country today. She does a lot of volunteer work and gives a lot of her time and money to charity; for that, she should be commended. But it has always seemed to me that she does it for her own publicity and not out of the goodness of her heart. But her show, and her entire public persona, drive me insane. I hold her largely responsible, along with Baba Wawa, for the idolization of celebrities we see today. They are two people who elevated celebrities to where they are today. Celebrities are some of the most unintelligent, narcissistic, self-indulgent, spoiled, and pampered people on the planet. But Oprah would have them sitting on her couch, asking them deep questions about how they “survived” rehab or drug abuse or the sex tape they made that went public. Celebrities were no longer just entertainers, they were suddenly deep, wise, pensive. We needed to know their thoughts. And Oprah could make them cry. She could find out how they feel about everything, and we were, for some reason, supposed to care.

I think it’s interesting to see how, over the past 25 years, we’ve become softer. And Oprah has been a part of that, I think. We’ve become a girlier nation, a country who emphasizes how we feel about everything, a country that obsesses over political correctness, a nation that is growing into more and more of a nanny state. Oprah is certainly not singularly responsible for that, by any means, but I think she was part of it. She certainly contributed. Oprah’s show was touchy-feely, it was emotional, and it was overtly liberal. And when I say it was liberal, I don’t mean politically (although it was that, too). It was in her lifestyle, her personality, her belief in big government and a nanny state, her worship of liberal politicians and celebrities. And for some reason, we were all supposed to admire her as some kind of icon. Why?? Frankly, her show always made me sick in it’s saccharine emotionalism, and I can’t say that I think that Oprah has had a positive effect on American culture. But hey, maybe that’s just me.