[energy123]

Not untrue, but also not the only thing going on.

The authoritarian movements of the 20th century wouldn't have been possible without mass media. But it wasn't the profit motive that was the prime culprit for this enablement.

Ideologues found they had a powerful tool at their disposal to channel people's grievances towards an enemy, and to bind a large group of people behind this ideology.

The inventors of the printing press and the radio didn't intend for it to be used this way.

[mschuster91]

> The inventors of the printing press and the radio didn't intend for it to be used this way.

Well, at least the printing press was created to print the Bible - the "Gutenberg bible", named after its inventor, was the first mass produced book in the world [1], so it can be said that it was intended to get a large group of people behind an ideology.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible

[krige]

Actually, no. The Gutenberg bible was not the goal of the printing press, although it might have been a business savvy move for a variety of reasons. We know that, possibly even before profitable Church orders of indulgences, it was used to print poem(s), of which one is still preserved in a museum, predating the bible by about 5 years.

[klez]

Let me nitpick here. The fact that something was printed before the Bible doesn't prove that spreading the Bible was not, in fact, the primary motive to invent the printing press. It could just mean that Gutenberg went with smaller stuff first.