When abolitionists were trying to focus public attention on slavery through newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, and novels, they were doing it in an attention market that was wildly underpopulated compared to what we live with now. Same for the civil rights movement of the second half of the twentieth century, when TV came to dominate public discourse. Martin Luther King Jr. and his cohort understood how important TV coverage of their movement was to moving public opinion in their direction.
