Her mentor was Helen Gurley Brown, the legendary publisher of Cosmopolitan magazine. After migrating to the United States at the age of 12, Cristina Saralegui went on to a career in publishing as the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine’s Spanish language version. After 10 years as editor of the magazine, Cristina Saralegui was ready to create her own talk show. Her program, "El Show de Cristina" is transmitted by Univisión to an audience estimated at 100 million all around the world. She is the Spanish language TV Oprah Winfrey. Recently, her show, which is very popular in the Dominican Republic, has been the center of controversy for the continuous presenting of entertaining albeit demeaning Dominican characters as talk show guests. The programs have been said to denigrate Dominicans. The Dominican community in New York protested, and the Dominican press has given ample coverage to the controversy. On Saturday, 21 March, whom could be Cristina’s Dominican counterpart, blond and lovely Nuria Piera, best known for her incisive interviews and investigative reporting on "Nuria en el 9", disclosed that the Cristina show is a farce. Apparently the producers of the show have discovered in the Dominican people great stage talent and have been recruiting normal Dominican people for the shows. On her Saturday evening show, Nuria presented four cases where the talk show guests were not whom they said they were on the show. One talk show guest who had complained of his wife’s infidelity was in real life not married. Another who had protested that his daughter was marrying a black man was not really the father of the girl nor was he even married. Another young girl who is black played the character of a Dominican who said that blacks should marry blacks and whites should marry whites. In real life she told Nuria she would prefer to marry someone who is lighter skinned than she is. Nuria also revealed that the woman who said that her daughter was making love to her husband was in real life the mother of the man who was supposedly her husband. The talk show guests said that they accepted to do the fake dramas because they were paid all expenses at deluxe hotels in Miami and chauffeured around in limousines for a weekend. One woman who went with her entire family of eight said that it was an opportunity they never could have had to travel as a family and vacation in Miami. Several of those interviewed said they followed scripts and then added some spice, as per instructions, which made for the programs that have high ratings. The Cristina show is shown here at 5 pm on Channel 5, a station that was supposedly "given" to its owner after the later was very supportive of the Partido de la Liberación Dominicana (PLD) in the past presidential campaign. Channel 5 was frequently operated by the state television station in the past. The governments television regulating organization has requested that the station change the time the show is televised to a later evening slot. The station has not complied. Yaqui Núñez del Risco, president of the leading local TV producers association, called the producers of the show "unethical" for capitalizing on the morbidness of the audience. It is yet to be seen if it is legal in the United States to present on television theater acts as real cases. Last week, Cristina’s husband, Marcos Avila told the Listín Diario that the stories were real and that the persons approached the station with their stories. "If we paid for invented stories and this was proven then we could be penalized by the regulating organization of the United States," Avila told the Listín Diario. Cristina Saralegui is about to launch her autobiography on Tuesday, 24 March in New York.
