Within just two years, commercial television—still by far the heavyweight champion of attention capture—had seen its own revolution of sorts. CBS canceled nearly every show about the rural/urban divide and characters that were “fish out of water.” As Life magazine wrote in 1971, “Slain were every single one of the hillbillies and their imitative relatives.” Also on the block: the once dominant Ed Sullivan Show. Now came a whole new kind of program, like The Mary Tyler Moore Show (about an unmarried urban career woman), All in the Family (centered on the experiences of a working-class bigot living in Queens, New York), and MAS*H (an antiwar comedy about a field hospital during the Korean War, with regular appearances by blood and death).

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 582