Toning down spectacle and adding moral framing expanded Winfrey’s audience

Evidence

The bet would pay off. Debuting in 1986, her show relied on an emotional, confessional style that was now what viewers wanted, combined with the lure of her own irresistible persona. She tacked toward respectability, shrewdly toning down the most lurid and shocking elements of AM Chicago, and thereby gained an even larger audience, rather as CBS made radio respectable in the 1930s, and as People had gentrified gossip journalism. Spectacle was now couched in principle, too. As one critic observed, she “cast her professional choices, persona, and style as moral ones” and “practiced a form of public ‘moral accountability’ with her audience.” Like People, too, she recognized that everyone loved to unburden herself, given the right conditions. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 786

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the CBS-gentrifies-radio and People-gentrifies-gossip pattern Wu traced earlier — a recurring gentrification cycle in attention industries. — connects to: Winfrey’s empathy-based confession format made her talk show a group therapy session — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 787