But even Winfrey was not immune to larger industry trends, and launching into an era of cable's decline would not prove easy. Many could either not find the network amidst the hundreds of channels on offering, or did not care to bother; in its first year, the network lost as much as $330 million. Winfrey used various means to try to recapture the lightning she once held in a bottle—most successfully, an interview of Lance Armstrong, the cyclist, who confessed to using performance-enhancing drugs. But these were one-off events and the audiences did not stay. She also made a go of her old show's religious aspiration with an ecumenical series named Belief, a program that would have qualified as public interest programming by the old metrics. While never quite losing her celebrity or strong reputation, she could no longer quite be considered the nation's Attention Merchant-in-Chief.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 812