Did Oprah Cause Cattle Prices to Fall?
It is worth noting that the fall in cattle futures occurred on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, not in grocery stores. There is no evidence suggesting that consumer beef-buying habits even flickered as a result of the Oprah show. The people who “panicked” were not gaga housewives with curlers in their hair. If we want to deal in stereotypes, they were cellphone-toting, BMW-driving, yuppie commodity traders. The Oprah show on mad cow disease came at a time when drought, high feed prices and oversupply were crippling cattlemen. It also came less than a month after the British government reversed a decade of denial and publicly admitted for the first time that contaminated beef was the “most likely explanation” for 10 human deaths from a disease that has come to be called “new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.” The Oprah show’s impact on beef prices therefore cannot be easily separated from a series of other factors, including the impact of other mad cow-related news coverage. Tim Brenna
