I don't think they were easy to ignore. News was far more valuable before mass communication, and authority was also far more respected. We can see this with ho

I don't think they were easy to ignore. News was far more valuable before mass communication, and authority was also far more respected. We can see this with how they used paper (and its equivalents) to distribute information, which is arguably far more expensive than distributing it over a wire or through radio waves. And indeed it was also more expensive the further back you go, because of how difficult it is to produce. For instance, there was a time when letters were so expensive that every millimetre of it was used to write on before sending it away. Yes, paper is of course still used today, but only for more valuable information, such as those connected with formalities or ads that the sender hopes will result in profit. Industrialization has of course made paper cheap enough to use it a lot more frivolously than before, but the mere difficulty and “slowness” of it prevents most people from using it more in daily life. Before the internet, or indeed before radio, it was really hard to find evidence to the contrary of any received information, so the default was to trust authority. Today you can find a scientific study (or perhaps a “scientific” study...) that opposes nearly whatever view you distrust at a click of a button. And thus groups and blocks form, and it's not easy to tell which one believes in the truth and which one does not. Indeed at some point most people just retire and trust the authorities that they like, which is how most political divides are created anyway. On a slightly different tangent; without condoning hate speech, today there is a great debate raging as to what should be defined as hate speech, and by whom, and I think the growing consensus is that big tech is a poor censor.