One regular program once commanded a quarter of the entire national audience daily

Evidence

In our fragmented age, it is only a few times a year when even a quarter of the entire nation listens to or watches anything at once. But during the height of the Amos ‘n’ Andy craze, that happened every day, and consequently the 7 p.m. time slot, according to contemporary reports, began to influence the schedule of everything. Hotels, restaurants, and movie theaters would broadcast the show for their patrons. Fearing displacement, movie theaters advertised the installation of radios to broadcast Amos ‘n’ Andy at 7 p.m., before the newsreels and features. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 318

Categorization

• XREF: Feeds the reader’s historical grounding on attention capture — early proof that a single attractor could reshape daily schedules and competing media. — connects to: Broadcast television uniquely allowed serious class drama to reach a cross-class national audience — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 336