> Even if you were roundly condemned, the area of effect was likely small and the duration transitory. In the past, the duration could be transitory even if th

> Even if you were roundly condemned, the area of effect was likely small and the duration transitory. In the past, the duration could be transitory even if the audience was larger! I think that because mass media archives were previously much less available and less easily searchable. If you got on TV or had an article or letter published in a newspaper or magazine, a whole lot of people might have seen it at a point in time, but it would be relatively inconvenient for people to do the research to dig it up on microfiche or VHS tape archives or something in order to try to punish you for what you said later on. So opposition research was mostly done against political candidates, judicial nominees, or whatever, but not necessarily against other people. When I was a college student I wrote a lot of letters to my college newspaper. Many of them got printed, and some of them greatly angered activists on campus, some of whom then expressed strong anger toward me. That was very shocking and upsetting for me, but probably the lifecycle of that anger was on the order of days to weeks, as opposed to having people routinely and easily look up my views in order to get angry at me over and over again months or years later (or even try to get me in hot water with friends or employers). In that case, I sought out a larger audience, but "enjoyed" that audience in a mostly pretty ephemeral way.