Put another way, at what level is the winner of a beauty contest famous? I don’t think people would universally agree except at the extremes. Miss America is famous, the winner of a spring break wet T-shirt contest isn’t barring something unusual happening.
Is Miss America even famous these days? I sure couldn't name one--though perhaps I'd recognize names from years past.
I tend to agree that if you go back a number of decades more local people were probably fairly well-known locally but I'm not sure I'd put the top guy at the Elks Lodge in the "famous" category. Draw a small enough circle in geography or niche interest and a lot of people are notable to some degree.
In both cases they easily qualify for a Wikipedia page though I doubt most people can name last years winners.
2. In the public eye.
Some people are only famous within their city.
"Throughout Newberry’s long history, there has been an accumulative list of memorable and locally famous people. Machinist and inventor, Reginald S. “Reg” Ruggles was one of them.", at https://mynewberrynews.com/community/newberrys-machinist-and... :
"Most of the letters ended with a PS containing one of Aunt Agatha's aphorisms, which became famous throughout the county" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Grapes
Secret lodges were once very popular, with their own hierarchies and (internal) fame.
Newspaper kiosks would carry a wider range of newspapers and magazines, but have now effectively disappeared.
Local clubs were also more common. When my old neighborhood was build in the 1950s, one of the lots we set aside as a clubhouse, with square dancing events. (It's since been turned into a pool.)
> go back a few decades and "everyone" watched the same lineup of TV on a Thursday night and it would probably have been something of a cultural knowledge shortcoming if you didn't know who the network news anchors were.
Sure, but godelski was talking about 50 years ago.
In the 1970s, a local TV station in Miami had "Toby the Robot" in a show to read the Sunday comics - https://www.pbase.com/donboyd/image/132365543 . Toby would also appear in local parades.
At https://www.pbase.com/donboyd/memories_tv_and_radio you can see some of the local Miami TV shows produced in the 1950s and 1960s .
Rick Shaw was an important local radio DJ - https://pbase.com/donboyd/memories_rickshaw . Read the comments about how locally famous he was.
Go back a few more years and there was even less network programming. If you saw the musical "Hairspray", that portrays a show based on Baltimore's Buddy Deane Show, which was one of several local teen dance television shows later replaced by national shows.
Remember, it wasn't until 1951 that we had a nation-wide microwave system that could carry TV broadcasts, and at the beginning most TV shows were still created locally. The Prime Time Access Rule went into place about 50 years ago to try to prevent that centralization.
(For another fictional movie portrayal, O Brother, Where Art Thou? shows The Soggy Bottom Boys achieving local fame because of their song on The Flour Hour.)
So even though there are new methods now, my observation is still that there were other ways to get famous, and some of these ways are no longer so common, making them somewhat hidden to modern viewpoints.
How then would you determine the validity of "There's way more B list and C list celebrities than ever before."?
I certainly don't know how.