On their date Ebert took Winfrey to a place called Hamburger Hamlet and gave her some unsolicited advice. Having begun to do so himself, he suggested she leave the networks and take charge of her media destiny. Winfrey wouldn't continue to date Ebert but she did take his advice, achieving a degree of independence that defied nearly all the existing strictures of the attention industries. She decided to take ownership of her show and sell it directly to television stations, becoming, in effect, a competitor to NBC, CBS, and other networks. She was the beneficiary of a federal rule enacted in 1972—part of a progressive backlash against broadcasters that President Richard Nixon found agreeable—designed to weaken their control over television.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 785