Irrelevant media reports

[People like you journalists/intellectuals] believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study, too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
— Senior Bush Advisor, quoted on background in the New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004 (Suskind, 2004)