On a historical timescale, the practical effect of the sovereignty of the press is just to play yet another whack-a-mole game of quis custodiet ipsos… - Curtis Yarvin

Objectively, an agency is official if it controls government decisions, or the government controls its decisions. A classic Orwellian state-controlled press is easy to recognize, even if the control path is informal—such as a financial subsidy. What about the other direction: a press-controlled state? ‘‘‘In the modern regime, government literally leaks power into journalism, by tolerating leaks: nominally unauthorized, but objectively permitted, disclosures of confidential information to the legitimate press. Leaking is both subsidy and control.’’’ … On Wall Street, selective disclosure of material nonpublic information is a crime… If the government enforced this standard on its own employees, journalism as we know it could not exist. … Putting these camouflaged agencies together, we see a Department of Reality which is unquestionably the center of power in our regime. No other agency can withstand it—certainly, no elected politician can withstand it. Sovereignty equals unaccountability, and our Reality Department is accountable to no one.

[E]very kind of human action has become shrouded in a vast cloud of something called "ethics", which no one can define, but no one is allowed to question. An actual holy book would be a serious improvement.

Journalism […] looks like an unfree market because it is tied so closely to the unfree market of higher education.