Jaqueline Bobo

First things first:  I have not read The Color Purple, nor have I seen the film!  However, from what I read in Jaqueline Bobo's essay, a part of me does think that she threw Spielberg under the bus.  The reason I think this is because in most of her arguments, she would allude back to her underlying point that the film version of The Color Purple was directed by Spielberg based on his perception of the novel.  While this fact should be noted and taken into consideration, it could have been written in such a way that it wasn't such a loud underlying theme.
On the other hand, I also believe that Bobo justified her argument that the novel focused on black female characters while the film focused on male characters.  She gave plenty of evidence from both the novel and film, and was able to convince me (having not read/seen either) that the approaches to the storyline were quite different.
The biggest thing for me, though, in any type of content analysis, is that messages are polysemic.  The encoded message (from the director) and the decoded message (from the viewer) will more often than not be slightly differing interpretations, if not completely different.  That is not to say that sometimes the decoded message can be pretty similar to the initial intent of the message, but still, perception is key!