TV

Did Oprah Try To Manipulate Nielsen Ratings — And Then Try To Cover It Up?

12:20 pm, February 13th | by Hillary Reinsberg

If you weren’t watching The Grammy’s last night, perhaps you were watching Downton Abbey, or Shameless, or a Kardashians rerun, or CNN. As much as Oprah Winfrey has power over all of us, admit it: you weren’t watching the OWN channel.

Winfrey took to Twitter last night to essentially beg her followers to tune into OWN during the Grammys. If you look back at her feed today, you’ll find this tweet from 9:08 PM: “Commercial Grammy people..u can turn to OWN.”

But you won’t find is this other tweet, which she sent at 9:03 PM. If you look back for the link though, it’s been deleted. ShortformBlog fortunately has the screencap, in which Winfrey asks viewers to tune in, specifically if they have a “Neilsen” (sic) box:

Why would she delete the tweet? Perhaps because some, like journalist and critic Jeff Jarvis, construed the urging as an attempt to manipulate ratings. Oprah’s responses to the heat still remain on Twitter, but the offending tweet is gone.

Of course, this isn’t the first time Winfrey’s taken to social media to essentially beg people to tune into her channel. Oprah, you are famous for getting people to listen to you. Work some of that magic. Please.

TAGS: oprah nielsen ratings | oprah own | oprah twitter

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