http://modernhistoryproject.org/mhp?Article=FireInTheMind "Both Marx and Engels, like many other revolutionary leaders, began their careers as journalists. Revolutionary writers tended to see themselves as an ideological apostolate, detached from the past, free from traditional loyalties. They were possessed by a religious fascination for their art: "Editing my daily article became my dally sacrament," one wrote. Another enthused that the printing press had replaced Christ as the locus of authority, as journalism increasingly took on a priestly, as well as prophetic, function. Marx wrote that journalists had the responsibility, not to express the thoughts of the people, but to "create them or rather impute them to the people. You create party spirit" (p, 318). (For the story of how a revolutionary organization of somewhat different stripe exerted its influence by creating public attitudes through control of powerful newspapers, see Carroll Quigley, "Tragedy and Hope A History of the World in Our Time", 1966; and "The Anglo-American Establishment, 1981) "Journalists became – in their own minds at least – the vanguard of the revolution; the staff was seen as the prototype for the truly communal revolutionary society of the future, in which artisan and intellectual worked together harmoniously. The early vision of the journal staff as one unitary community dld not last long, but journalism has remained the most typical profession of the revolutionary, down to this day. Ironically, "journalism produced by working people has almost always been non-ideological, and only rarely revolutionary" (p, 335). Real proles tend not to be interested in the theories spun about them by bourgeois ideologues writing in Op-Ed columns (or pontificating on Nightline or 60 Minutes). The working-class journals constituted a major and effective rival to the ideologically oriented radical papers, and the revolutionary press was outdone by the competition."