The roster of Nobel Peace Prize winners, though it has some strange people on it from time to time, tends to feature folks who fought for social justice in a nonviolent and constructive way somehow.

The mass media in the days of newspapers and television it's hard to be able to find a story that's about just what you're interested in at the time you're interested in it.

Disarming behavior, where you have two sides involved in a conflict that everybody has stereotypes of the evil other side that is convinced that they would never ever do something reasonable. If a leader on one of those sides were to defy those stereotypes then it would change everything.