The Scoop on Oprah . . . Sort Of : Television: Channels 4 and 7 are engaged in a ratings week war to grab the talk-show host’s fans, but this columnist has the real exclusive.

You know you’re inhaling ratings sweeps vapors when moldy pop psychologist Joyce Brothers gets unzipped from her body bag at KCBS-TV Channel 2 and is rouged, powdered and propped up for yet another titillatingly titled series on sex.

And when maxi-star Oprah Winfrey appears on TV here daily this week not once, not twice, but in triplicate.

Each exciting day of Winfreys begins with “Oprah” airing in its usual 3 p.m. time slot on KABC-TV Channel 7. Then Winfrey gets advertised by the usual sweeps-tailored series about her from reporter Pam Thomson in the 4 p.m. segment of Channel 7’s “Eyewitness News.”

On Monday, old clips were used to rehash Winfrey’s oft-told story of being sexually abused in her youth. And Thomson promised that a visit with Winfrey’s fans on Tuesday would reveal “why she is the most popular talk-show host in the world.”

Well, yes, this was quite a scoop. Yet quite candidly you would have expected something a little more spectacular from the usually resourceful Channel 7, like having Winfrey parachute onto the “Eyewitness News” set. Instead, it seemed almost as if Channel 7 were conceding the week’s Oprah oompah to its major news competitor.

For when it comes to strategic chutzpah, give the silver plate to KNBC-TV Channel 4, whose own highly advertised weeklong “intimate look” at Winfrey is aimed at using her to steal luster--which translates to ratings--from Channel 7. In other words, Channel 4 is devilishly usurping the enemy’s big star in an attempt to steal its viewers.

It’s Winfrey, after all, who has been Channel 4’s afternoon nemesis. Her blockbuster syndicated talk show for years has destroyed all comers at 3 p.m., providing a powerful lift-off for the usually ratings-topping Channel 7 news bloc that follows, delivering viewers to “Eyewitness News” the way Moses delivered his flock to the Red Sea.

But what was this on Monday?

“Oprah, as you’ve never seen her before. . . ,” Channel 4 humorist Paul Moyer chirped in an oft-repeated promo for his 5 p.m. newscast. In introducing the Winfrey series late in the newscast, Moyer affirmed his reputation as a great kidder by stating with a straight face that people “don’t really know about her at all.”

That would be the people who had not read her book or read or seen the zillions of stories about her in the media or heard her talk about herself on her own show. Or the people living in Tibet. Or the glazed brains at Channel 4.

Meanwhile, just how “intimate” is Channel 4’s look at Winfrey? So “intimate” that the “Entertainment Tonight” reporter who fronts it said at the top Monday: “We have some original interviews, and we borrow from a variety of sources.” Those “sources” consist of old material seamed together for this series. And the “original interviews” are with Winfrey’s relatives and others who observe her from afar, not with the star herself. Instead, she appears in snippets of interviews that, viewers are told, “Entertainment Tonight” conducted “a while back.” As in another millennium, given that this Winfrey is relatively rotund compared with the current slim Winfrey.

On Tuesday, “a feminist, a psychologist and a gossip columnist” were scheduled to reveal what they knew “about the Oprah phenom.”

Not only is all of this worthless, but as a bonus, it’s also exclusive.

*

Yet an intimate look at Oprah Winfrey without her direct participation is a concept that should not be cavalierly dismissed. Thus, here is my own contribution to the genre, “Oprah: Her True Story.”

I asked Maria Shriver what Oprah was really like. “She doesn’t worry about her image or her credibility,” Shriver told me exclusively on Page 257 of “Let’s Talk!” by James Robert Parish. Shriver added about Oprah: “She just asks from her gut.”

I asked Walter Goodman of the New York Times about Oprah’s interview style. “An energetic performer, she makes busy use of her audience, moving nonstop through the aisles and slipping now and then into a just-folks dialect,” Goodman replied, exclusively to me, on the same page.

I asked myself what I thought of Oprah. My brilliant exclusive reply: “She’s a big star.”

It was time to have a word with Oprah herself. I wondered why her show was so special, and her reply, exclusively to me again on Page 257, was direct and blunt: “We go for the gut. We go for the absolute gut.”

I asked Oprah about that special man in her life, Steadman, expecting her to waffle. Yet I scored the scoop I was after when she replied on Page 265: “Stead is my rock.” Whew. Gathering myself for a big finish, I pressed Oprah on the future. The exclusive answer brought a smile to my face: “At this moment, I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.”

Heady with success from my Oprah exclusive, I decided to do a story on another superstar, “Bill Cosby: Exclusive to Me.”

I was wondering how Bill felt about his kids. “I have five children and I love them as much as a father possibly could,” he informed me in his book, “Fatherhood.” On another page, he graciously answered my question about his Lake Tahoe performances: “I noticed a boy of about 14 sitting quietly near the stage. He clearly wasn’t enjoying the show. I decided to bring him into it and then he’d be partly responsible for not having any fun.”

Racking up more exclusive material, I decided to ask Bill about his plans for old age. “The first thing I’m going to do when I turn 70,” Bill replied in his book, “Time Flies,” “is to go to a restaurant like the one across the street from the Mayo Clinic.” Oh, that was great.

I next asked Bill to tell a joke. I got no response at all until exclusively turning to Page 142: “A few days ago on television, I saw a commercial for a liquid detergent. Two different women were displaying their hands side by side for the nation to admire.

“ ‘Can you tell the mother’s hands from her daughter’s?’ an announcer asked me.

“ ‘Of course,’ I replied. ‘The daughter’s hands are the ones that have just been in her mother’s wallet.’ ”

Finally, I asked Bill a sports question that had been exclusively on my mind for a long time. When did he think the NBA will play on another planet?

Bill responded to me in his third book, “Childhood,” when he boldly predicted: “The NBA will play on Pluto before the first father understands the mind of his teen-age daughter.”

Pluto--that’s another name for ratings sweeps, right?