NBC on Monday deleted and explained away a tweet it had published during the Golden Globes Sunday night referring to Oprah Winfrey as “OUR future president.”
“Nothing but respect for OUR future president #GoldenGlobes” the tweet read, above a photo of Oprah at the awards show, where she received the Cecil B. DeMille Award.
A follow-up dispatch came the next morning:
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
During his monologue Sunday night, Golden Globes host Seth Meyers recounted jokes he made at Donald Trump’s expense during the 2011 White House Correspondents dinner.
“In 2011, I told some jokes about our current President at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, jokes about how he was unqualified to be president. Some have said that night convinced him to run,” Meyers said. ”So if that’s true, I just want to say: Oprah, you will never be president! You do not have what it takes!”
Oprah’s speech, a hopeful rumination on the impact of the #MeToo movement and recent reporting on workplace sexual harassment, was seen by some political commentators as the opening move for a 2020 presidential bid.
Winfrey’s partner, Stedman Graham, told the Los Angeles Times that “[i]t’s up to the people” if she runs for president. “She would absolutely do it,” he said.
And CNN’s Brian Stelter reported that two unnamed close friends of Winfrey’s said she was “actively thinking” of running — a possibility she didn’t rule out in a March 2017 interview.
