Umberto Eco in "Travels In Hyper-Reality"
(Picador 1986), page 135, "Towards a
Semiological Guerilla Warfare", which begins:

``Not long ago, if you wanted to seize political power in a country,
you had merely to control the army and the police. Today it is only
the most backward countries that fascist generals, in carrying out a
coup d'etat, still use tanks. If a country has reached a high level of
industrialization the whole scene changes. The day after the fall of
Khrushchev, the editors of Pravda, Izvestia, the heads of the radio
and the television were replaced; the army wasn't called out. Today a
country to the person who controls the communications.''