In the US, Alexander Hamilton comes pretty close. The seeds were there even at the founding.
You and I have about the same traceback to the framework of the current situation - founding of the Fed and similar. Woodrow Wilson, to me, marks the era that the globalists cinched the grab of the US.
I point out, from time to time, that the advent of radio coincidentally facilitated mass propaganda. Also, maybe not coincidentally, this era is when Lippmann and others were advancing the myth of objective journalism. The fools actually bought it.
To your ultimate point: Ecclesiastes 1 KJV captures the point well, IMO.
The newspapers, especially Hearst, had this well in hand long before radio.
There was a mysterious event in the middle of State of the Union. The campaign is inspired by the manipulative newspaper magnate, Angela Lansbury, who had taken Tracy away from Hepburn and then proposed him as candidate for president. For a while, Tracy runs his own campaign, true to his beliefs that government was corrupt and that business and labor could work together to make things better. The corrupt influencers, including his campaign manager, are always trying to have their way with him.
Lansbury stays out of the campaign, to make sure the wife stays in, but at a critical point just before a major speech, Tracy is whisked into a room for a secret meeting with Lansbury, after which he emerges as just another politician mouthing the same platitudes and making the same backroom deals.
I wonder what went on in that room. What leverage did they now have over Tracy? Perhaps he simply realized that he would have to do whatever it took, however distasteful, to become president.
At the end of the movie, Tracy quits the campaign, but resolves to be a thorn in the side of both parties through to the election. Perhaps by now he realized that with all the deals he had to make, the presidency wouldn't be worth a bucket of warm spit.