An Oprah segment drove 1.2 million emails to a foreign government.

Evidence

Winfrey’s viewers and their contacts sent an estimated 1.2 million e-mails to the Nigerian government. In addition, thousands of viewers posted on Internet message boards. The Dr. Phil Show (produced by Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions) hosted a message board, “Can We Save Amina Lawal’s Life?” for viewers to post their responses to the show. The posts began immediately after the show was aired and continued for a year, until the sentence was overturned. Hundreds of viewers posted messages on a variety of themes, expressing outrage and encouraging action, debating the extent to which stoning is an Islamic practice, debating the extent to which adultery is a crime that should be punished by law, and debating whether the United States is a beacon of compassion and justice or a hypocrite for intervening in the laws of other countries. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 713

Categorization

• SHARE: A specific, quantifiable example of television-driven mass political action — great detail for anyone working on media effects or the Oprah effect specifically.
• CANDY: That an Oprah episode on a Nigerian stoning sentence generated 1.2 million emails to a government is a striking dinner-table fact.