Opinion | Oprah Winfrey’s Influence on Social Media

When Oprah Winfrey went on TV and confessed to having been a victim of childhood sexual abuse, she did expand the purview of what we could discuss in public on broadcast media, and at that moment, she was able to transform those two threads of American culture that were producing the 1980s into something that marked her brand forever, legitimized her, differentiated her from Geraldo Rivera, Jerry Springer, Sally Jessy Raphael. And her most immediate competitor at the time was Phil Donahue. So she really knew how to use the medium of television. Because television itself was always seen as somewhat like vulgar, low, bad from the middlebrow, highbrow cultural elites. And one of the ways that it tried to legitimize itself in the ’50s and ’60s was that it wanted to make itself informative. So they had a lot of talk shows. The sponsors would come on, like Lysol or Dove, but the selling was marginalized. And the information and the discussion was supposed to model like democratic public sphere. By the time you get to daytime television and 24-hour news cycles, you have an increasingly intensive need to sell, inform and draw your audience into this kind of intimacy that was very unique to the medium. Now social media has taken on that role.