Last night, NBC took a beating from conservative Twitter users after a tweet during the Golden Globes was perceived as an endorsement of a speculative presidential run by Oprah Winfrey. (Let’s all take a moment to absorb that sentence and how completely un-crazy it sounds in 2018.)
Winfrey gave a rousing speech last night as she accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement, fueling a flurry of social media chatter about a possible 2020 White House bid. But not everyone thinks it’s a great idea, and some of those critics tweeted their disapproval at the folks at NBC for ostensibly declaring themselves Team Oprah. The offending tweet–which came from the Peacock Network’s main account–said, “Nothing but respect for OUR future president.” It included a GIF of the former queen of daytime talk.
NBC has since deleted the tweet, saying it was sent by a third-party social media agency and “not meant as a political statement.”
Yesterday a tweet about the Golden Globes and Oprah Winfrey was sent by a third party agency for NBC Entertainment in real time during the broadcast. It is in reference to a joke made during the monologue and not meant to be a political statement. We have since removed the tweet.
— NBC (@nbc) January 8, 2018
Make of that explanation what you will, but let’s not forget this is the same network that took a lot of flak for letting Donald Trump host SNL in 2015. Also, it’s probably worth mentioning that Oprah’s talk show was distributed by CBS.