I'd put it a bit differently: people with very little power banded together to create a movement that together has
some power and was making incremental progress over the decades, but allies were needed to accelerate it and make big change. After Kennedy's assassination Lyndon Johnson lent his enormous political capital to revive a dying civil rights bill and get it passed, and that was a big push, so much so that it lost his party the south for 50+ years.
I fully agree media consumption doesn't fix a whole lot, and certainly not in today's media environment, I merely advocate for staying informed and engaged enough to discover a useful way to make impact. I want to live in a world where we mostly just live our lives as we please, but society's state right now is such that I don't think it will let us off that easy.