essay on democracy and fourth estate

12.1 The Media as a Political Institution: Why Does It Matter?

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Explain the importance of a free press both in the United States and abroad.
• Describe how the media acts as a watchdog and give examples.
• Understand and define how political information is mediated.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. —The 1st Amendment to the United States Constitution

The press is the only profession explicitly protected in the United States Constitution. Many attribute this protection to James Madison and his writings in the Federalist Papers , but the idea of a free press stretches back to well before Madison wrote out his ideas on what constitutes a perfect democracy. The origins of the free press in the United States can be traced back to Cato’s letters , a collection of essays written in the 1720s by two British writers, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon . Using the pseudonym Cato, they published their articles in the British press, criticizing the British monarchy for its corruption and tyrannical practices. Decades later, American colonists felt the effects of these letters during their own struggles against the Crown, 1 and in 1776, Virginia became the first state to formally adopt a constitutional provision to protect press freedom. 2 Why is the idea of protecting the press so embedded in the United States’ concept of government, and why is this concept so important? Do other nations protect the media to the same extent, or even more? The next section will examine these questions.

The Fourth Estate and Freedom of the Press

The importance of a free press can be boiled down to a sentence from esteemed University of Illinois at Chicago lecturer Doris Graber ’s seminal work Mass Media and American Politics : “The mass media . . . serve as powerful guardians of political norms because the American people believe that a free press should keep them informed about the wrongdoings of government.” 3 Another common way of defining the media’s role is to say that it acts as the fourth estate , or the unofficial fourth branch of government that checks the others. The term fourth estate is credited to Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle , who wrote, “Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporter’s Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.” 4 In other words, people look to the media—the fourth estate—to keep the government in check. The role of the media must be protected if it is to carry out that task.

Throughout US history, the media has fulfilled this role as intended. In the late 1960s, Rand Corporation analyst Daniel Ellsberg provided classified documents to the New York Times and the Washington Post proving that the government was concealing protracted military involvement in the Vietnam War. The New York Times withstood government pressure and a Supreme Court case to go on to publish a series of articles now known as the Pentagon Papers , which revealed the extent to which the American public had been lied to about the country’s progress in that war. The Watergate scandal is perhaps the most famous example of press freedom and the role of the press as watchdog (another term for the fourth estate ). In this instance, a government informant known as Deep Throat fed Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein confidential information about then president Richard Nixon’s corrupt campaign practices. An ensuing series of investigative pieces by the two journalists revealed multiple abuses of power in Nixon’s reelection campaign, and their reporting ultimately led to the indictment of multiple presidential aides and the eventual resignation of the president himself.

In this video clip, investigative journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, editor Barry Sussman, and former executive editor Ben Bradlee recall how, when they worked for the Washington Post in 1972, they broke the story of the Watergate scandal, a story that started with an investigation of a break-in at a Washington, DC, hotel and led to a constitutional crisis, the resignation of President Richard Nixon, and almost 50 criminal convictions.

In the case of the Pentagon Papers, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that the president’s argument—that prior restraint 5 was necessary in order to protect national security—was not enough “to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment ,” 6 and this is the most important First Amendment case because it addresses the sweeping right of the press and press protections in the 20th century. Watergate showed how a protected press is free to serve one of its main purposes, which is to reveal government misconduct. New Yorker staff writer Richard Harris wrote at the time that, “The press was potentially Mr. Nixon’s enemy—far more than the courts or Congress, because only the press could dig out and tell the story (whatever help reporters might get from the courts or Congress) in a way that would arouse the people to demand an accounting.” 7

Watchdogs do not have to be journalistic behemoths like the New York Times or the Washington Post. In the United Kingdom, a small, independent newspaper called the Rochdale Alternative Paper revealed decades-long abuse allegations against Liberal Party MP 8 Cyril Smith . The exposé in the paper, which had a circulation of 8,000 at its highest, 9 eventually led to both a police and an independent government investigation into a child abuse ring that involved several high-level government officials, including MP Peter Morrison, the private secretary to then prime minister Margaret Thatcher . 10 Another way to understand the watchdog function of the press is through the term muckraker , referring to reform-minded investigative journalists during the Progressive Era in the United States (late 1800s to early 1900s) who exposed the wrongdoings of industry leaders. One famous example of a muckraker was Upton Sinclair , who wrote the novel The Jungle based on the corrupt and inhumane practices in American meatpacking companies at the turn of the 20th century. The publication of The Jungle led to governmental action on food safety. In his 1919 work The Brass Check , Sinclair exposed the journalism industry’s penchant for yellow journalism , or journalism that relies on catchy titles and human interest stories to drive sales over well-researched articles or pieces on civic affairs. Sinclair was not afraid to take on media titans such as William Randolph Hearst , who owned the nation’s largest chain of newspapers at the time.

Watchdogs and muckrakers act as a check on government action and corruption. They play an important part in exercising the role of a free press as a cornerstone of a functioning democracy. As Yale University professor and member of the Council on Foreign Relations Timothy Snyder writes, “If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.” 11 The media allows the public to understand what is happening in government in order to hold elected officials accountable. Or, perhaps more simply put, “A free press is important because it is the freedom upon which all of our other freedoms are contingent.” 12

How free is the press? The answer is not black and white, as evidenced by the 2021 World Press Freedom Index . Published every year by Reporters Without Borders , the Freedom Index measures freedom in 180 countries “based on an evaluation of pluralism, independence of the media, quality of legislative framework and safety of journalists in each country and region.” 13 The map in Figure 12.3 below shows that the press is freer in some countries (in pink and purple on the map) than in others (in blue and green).

According to the index and as reflected in the map, Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Denmark have the freest presses in the world. Notably, Norway tries to discourage media concentration in order to ensure a variety of outlets, something that will be discussed in later parts of this chapter. The 2021 index ranked the United States 44th, after South Africa (32nd), Botswana (38th), and South Korea (42nd).

George Mason University professor Sam Lebovic explains that two main factors, the rise of concentration in ownership and increased state secrecy, are responsible for the inadequacy of press freedom in the United States, which is an ongoing and serious problem. 14 The modern US media faces unprecedented struggles against declining viewership and revenues, which work to limit the number of outlets and decrease the number of working journalists. At the same time, legislation such as the Patriot Act , passed after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, has made it more difficult for the press to verify state information because of increasing pressure on sources not to cooperate and prosecution of journalists who do ascertain information. In addition, the Trump administration further hampered press freedoms through the prosecution of news sources, public statements that discredited journalists, and encouragement of foreign leaders to take steps to restrict their own media. 15 The future of press freedom in America, while still unstable due to media concentration and surveillance laws such as the Patriot Act, may show some signs of improvement; in a speech on Press Freedom Day in 2021, President Joe Biden decried the imprisonment of 274 reporters worldwide, criticized the lack of local media outlets, and said that the United States “recognize[s] the integral role a free press plays in building prosperous, resilient, and free societies.” 16 Despite these laudatory comments about a free press, however, it is clear the United States faces challenges in protecting journalists’ ability to fulfill their roles.

A study of the United States and Latin America provides an example of how this idea of the importance of a free press is shared across cultures. In the study, journalists representing both cultures shared a common definition of a free press as one that functions without government pressure and to promote social and economic development. 17 This study considered whether or not a free press is related to increased economic development, a question that to date has not been conclusively answered. While the notion that political freedoms (such as freedom of the press) should naturally encourage economic growth and increased standards of living is a common one, current research has not found conclusive evidence either supporting or refuting the claim. 18

There is more of a consensus on the benefits of a free press when it comes to preventing corruption. Studies of press freedom around the world, conducted by scholars in England, Argentina, and Australia, confirm this theory. 19 In this way, the watchdog role that the press plays is based on democratic ideals and has real-world effects for the public.

The Mediated Nature of Political Information

The political information most people receive is mediated information . What does this mean? Unless they work directly in government, most citizen’s understanding of politics comes completely from the media, whether via television news, podcasts, or social media feeds. The media may be a gatekeeper, but it is also a storyteller. As such, it is important to realize that what people see in the media is actually a manufactured view of the political world. Journalists and others who create the news follow routines and are influenced by institutional values that manifest themselves in media content. As Columbia University professor Herbert Gans writes in his study of the American media, “The news does not limit itself to reality judgments; it also contains values, or preference statements. This in turn makes it possible to suggest that there is, underlying the news, a picture of nation and society as it ought to be.” 20 Gans acknowledges that professional journalists try to be objective, yet the news does in fact make judgments and value statements. For example, crime news alerts viewers to the idea that there are undesirable actors within society and that criminals should be punished. Judgments and value statements such as these are different from political bias; while some news outlets are overtly liberal or conservative, Gans’s study shows that the media produces stories with cultural values that people may not detect because they are so used to seeing stories presented this way. For example, according to Gans, ethnocentrism and altruistic democracy are two of the key enduring values in the news. Ethnocentrism in the news refers to the idea that the American media values the United States above all other nations. This manifests most obviously in war coverage, where the press rarely questions American involvement—and to do so would be unpatriotic. In a similar vein, Gans explains that the American news media emphasize an altruistic democracy , the ideal held up by the media that politics should be based on public service and for the public interest. 21 In these ways, the news makes statements about what is right and what is wrong and presents political news through these lenses.

Journalists also share other professional values as to what makes a “good” news story, such as proximity, negativity, scope (how big is the story?), timeliness, and unexpectedness (novelty). 22 Because journalists share these professional values, there is a certain homogeneous quality to the news, otherwise known as pack journalism . This means that people receive the same type of news story repeatedly, though this has been changing since the advent of online news, a topic that will be discussed later in the chapter. Journalists’ common ideas about what should be in the news and why color their coverage and presentation of the news—and, as a result, the public’s perception of politics.

It is important here to note that the concept of news values differs across countries—what is newsworthy in the United States may not be in other nations—and the role of the media differs as well. A study on the news in Japan found that strong cultural forces and local needs drive how news is produced and delivered. 23 Other scholars have found that Western news organizations highlight human interest stories, while Arabic news focuses more on social responsibility and Islamic values. 24 University of Leicester Professor Vincent Campbell echoes the sentiment that news organizations in different countries are fueled by different values and that this influences what stories their audiences see. In authoritarian countries, journalists focus less on performing the watchdog role and more on promoting state activities. 25 This is the case in countries such as North Korea and China, where the state government runs the media.

Related to the idea that the media in large part decides what is a good news story is the concept of the media’s gatekeeping role and its agenda-setting powers. In other words, according to agenda-setting theory , the media decides both what to ignore or filter out and what to show the public. As University of Texas professor Maxwell McCombs and University of North Carolina professor Donald Shaw write, “In choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom staff, and broadcasters play an important part in shaping political reality. Readers learn not only about a given issue, but also how much importance to attach to that issue from the amount of information in a news story and its position.” 26 Whether it is a producer who selects the topics for the evening news or an algorithm that creates a social media news feed, people know what is “news” by what is fed to them, they know what is important based on how often it gets airtime, and they understand that there are lead stories and stories that don’t matter very much. The public doesn’t make these decisions; professionals within the news industry make them for the public. (Later parts of this chapter will discuss how this power dynamic has changed thanks to social media and how, in many ways, it is no longer media professionals who select what the public sees.)

If the media decides which stories to present, it also has a hand in deciding how stories are presented. According to framing theory , the way the media frames political information can affect people’s understanding of it. University of Illinois professor David Tewksbury and University of Wisconsin professor Dietram A. Scheufele explain:

“Artists know that the frame placed around a painting can affect how viewers interpret and react to the painting itself. . . . Journalists—often subconsciously—engage in essentially the same process when they decide how to describe the political world. They choose images and words that have the power to influence how audiences interpret and evaluate issues and policies.” 27

For example, a study on gubernatorial races found that female candidates were more likely to be framed in terms of personal characteristics than their male counterparts, who were more likely to be framed in terms of their positions on policy issues. 28 In a separate study, researchers found that one common way the Dutch national media framed news on the European Union (EU) was in terms of assigning responsibility for social problems to the government. This study suggests that the Dutch media’s presentation of political news reflects the public expectation that the government will provide social welfare programs. 29 By highlighting certain aspects of a story and ignoring others, frames can affect people’s judgments and opinions on policy issues, and just as with agenda setting, elected officials fight to make sure they are framed in the correct light.

The public, and individual viewers, should know that while the media is a critical tool that aids people’s political decision-making, it is guided by professional values that dictate the content. Individuals’ views on politics can sometimes be out of their control, but they can work to assemble a better picture of the world by turning to a variety of media outlets and becoming aware of what goes into story selection. While internal pressures (such as professional norms) or external forces (such as authoritarian governments) can influence how the media portrays information, ownership can also affect what the public sees. The next section will examine the different types of media—and, perhaps more importantly, who owns them and how this affects their role in the political world.

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Book Reviews

Figuring out our fourth estate.

Can democracy survive in the absence of agreed-upon facts?

By Scott Stossel | December 10, 2020

An Aristocracy of Critics: Luce, Hutchins, Niebuhr, and the Committee That Redefined Freedom of the Press b y Stephen Bates; Yale University Press, 336 pp., $28

American democracy, always perhaps less sturdy than we imagined, has shown itself of late to be alarmingly fragile. Its survival depends on a number of elements currently in short supply: elected officials who abide not just by the law but by long-observed Constitutional principles and norms of behavior; a body politic animated more by the better angels of our nature than by our baser instincts or a cynical grasping after power; and, finally, on some minimum number of agreed-upon facts, and a shared sense of reality, among the citizenry.

That last element—the shared sense of reality—has been disintegrating for a while, for a host of reasons, many of them relating to what the journalist Bill Bishop termed The Big Sort, the clustering of Americans into geographic (and now also, especially, online) enclaves of the politically, economically, and culturally like-minded, in which ideological affinity for fellow enclave-dwellers is always deepening and ideological hostility toward the denizens of other enclaves is always mounting. This political sorting has been accelerated by the breakdown of a media ecosystem in which most Americans watched one of the three national broadcast TV networks and understood that when, say, Walter Cronkite declared “that’s the way it is,” well, that’s the way it was. In the current media ecosystem, there’s no longer any shared view of the way it is—you’ve got the Fox News view and the MSNBC view, The Daily Caller view and The Daily Beast view. Social media further seals people into their closed epistemic bubbles, exacerbating social division and the sense that we have two competing realities.

If we cannot agree on basic, scientifically measurable reality ( Is climate change real? Do masks and other public-health measures help mitigate the spread of Covid-19? Did Joe Biden win more votes than Donald Trump?) , then finding common political ground becomes impossible. Once a country sinks to this level of epistemological collapse, then “democracy is on the skids,” as Reinhold Niebuhr, America’s wisest political thinker since the Founders, once put it. When you reach that point, Niebuhr said, the country is susceptible to a racially scapegoating demagogue and at risk of sliding into fascism.

Niebuhr was talking about the America of the spring of 1944, when already-well-established fascists were still on the march in Europe, but his observation applies with distressing aptness to America in the fall of 2020. He was speaking at a meeting of The Commission on Freedom of the Press, a concatenation of some of the nation’s most eminent academics and intellectuals who came together amid world crisis to try and sort out how the fourth estate could better handle its responsibilities as a steward of democracy and a cultivator of citizens.

As Stephen Bates recounts in An Aristocracy of Critics: Luce, Hutchins, Niebuhr, and the Committee That Redefined Freedom of the Press , the Commission was conceived over drinks at the Drake Hotel in Chicago, in December 1942, when Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine, proposed to his old Yale cohort Robert Maynard Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago, the idea that Hutchins might undertake a comprehensive philosophical examination of the relationship between a free press and a healthy constitutional democracy, to be funded by Time Inc. Though initially skeptical, Hutchins convened 13 of the most prominent political scientists, philosophers, historians, and legal scholars in the country—”the most extraordinary collaboration of American thinkers in the twentieth century,” as Bates has it—who worked for three years to produce a number of book-length reports on the topic. In a series of brief sketches of the committee members—the most notable of whom included Niebuhr, poet Archibald Macleish, historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr., and Harold Lasswell (“by many estimates the most prolific political scientist ever”), along with other luminaries from the faculties at Harvard and the University of Chicago—Bates skillfully blends biography and intellectual history to provide a sense of how the clash of ideas and the clash of personalities intersected.

The central issue that Luce wanted the commission to examine—the media’s role in sustaining democracy—had been expressed a few years earlier by columnist Walter Lippmann, the most eminent behind-the-scenes advisor to the Commission. “The health of a society,” Lippmann had written in 1920, in Liberty and the News , “depends on the quality of the information it receives”—so if the newspaper, “the bible of democracy,” fails to maintain that quality, then “the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis in journalism.” Two years later, in Public Opinion , Lippmann lamented that democracy requires “an appetite for uninteresting truths” (good governance is boring!) that most newspaper readers do not possess, preferring instead to read about the sensational or the tawdry. (Another advisor to the commission, John Grierson, a Scottish filmmaker—he coined the term documentary —puckishly dissented, arguing that the “yellow press at its yellowest” was “the most considerable contribution to democratic education in the last fifty years,” because tabloid journalism got the masses to read about America and was thereby a principal engine of immigrant assimilation.)

Picking up on Lippmann’s writing about the function of expertise in a democracy, the Commission promoted what it called “the democratic hypothesis,” the idea that “if people have access to the facts and arguments, they will govern themselves more wisely than anyone can govern them.” The role of expertise in democracy has grim salience today, as the question of what role scientific experts should have in setting public health rules during a pandemic has taken on potent political charge. But in our fractured media environment, the problem is that there are facts and “alternative facts,” information and disinformation.

Although most of the Commission’s members were born in the late 1800s, their recommendations about how to manage this challenge have surprising currency. Lasswell, who was an expert on propaganda (both producing and resisting it), proposed that antidemocratic books and articles bear warning labels that not only highlighted the danger but pointed to “a suitable antidote”—anticipating by 80 years the content labels Twitter and Facebook have lately started putting on misinformation.

Nor, it turns out, are self-reinforcing media echo chambers a unique product of the digital age. In January 1946, Paul Lazarsfeld, a sociologist at Columbia, explained to the Commission that people “expose themselves only to those things which reinforce their opinions. … The Democrats listen only to Democrats and the Republicans listen only to Republicans.” As Bates puts the general proposition: “When information clashes with deep-rooted pre-conceptions, the audience tends to reject it.” We’re seeing this play out vividly now: When Fox News deviates even a little from lockstep Trumpian orthodoxy, Fox viewers angrily defect to farther-right outlets like Newsmax and OANN that cater to their delusions and preconceptions.

Some of the ideas the Commission considered were intriguing. Should a publisher who fails to disclose that editorial content has been provided by a paying advertiser be prosecuted for bribery? Should an editor who knowingly publishes falsehoods be subject to criminal proceedings? Should journalists have to be licensed the way lawyers, doctors, and hairdressers are, allowing for the threat of effective disbarment from the profession for the violation of ethical standards? All ideas worth considering, but the finished report didn’t contain any of these recommendations. Partly as a result, Luce found the whole report milquetoast—bland and insufficiently philosophical in its approach.

Despite the project’s noble aspirations, the Commission was a bit of a disaster—an orgy of clashing egos, missed deadlines, and general disorganization. Its main product, a book called A Free and Responsible Press (1947), was, like many a committee-produced document, a watered-down offering that aimed to offend no one and therefore satisfied no one, least of all its principal patron. Part of the problem was one of disorganized execution—the Commission’s chair, Hutchins, was distracted by his unraveling marriage, among many other things. But there was also confusion in conception, a lack of clear agreement on the committee’s purpose. Was it supposed to provide a stronger philosophical basis for the existence of a free press in a democracy? Propose new business models for a struggling industry? Offer practical recommendations on thorny policy issues like the application of antitrust law toward media ownership or the enforcement of journalistic standards and practices? It tried to do a little of all of this, with only modest success. When A Free and Responsible Press was published, it received a mixed (at best) critical reception and was a commercial failure. Luce himself grudgingly gave it only “a gentleman’s C.” For his part, Hutchins ended up exasperated. “I am sorry I ever met Harry Luce,” he rued.

Yet for all its shortcomings, over time the Commission’s work insinuated itself into the thinking of media scholars and journalism schools. Bates—himself a professor of journalism and media studies at UNLV—traces its intellectual legacy. The so-called “social responsibility theory” of media, which took hold in journalism schools in the 1950s, maintains that the press should by all means do what it can to attract readership through entertaining storytelling but that its principal function must be to hold powerful people to account, and to provide readers with the tools necessary to be good democratic citizens. This was the kind of robust argument that Luce sought from his Commission but didn’t get.

Today, both media and democracy are in crisis. Newspaper revenue in America is down by nearly three-quarters across the past 15 years. Newsrooms are shrinking. Local news is disappearing. Business models are broken. The president has normalized the tarnishing of responsible reporting as “Fake News.” A substantial portion of the population no longer believes in democratic institutions.

But before we despair about how far we’ve fallen, we should recall that any postwar Golden Age of media was brief, and was in fact preceded by times and conditions perhaps darker than our own. In the 1940s, as Bates recounts, the Roosevelt administration tried to prosecute the Chicago Tribune for sedition—FDR even contemplated sending the Marines to occupy the Tribune Tower! (He also accused Time of aiding the Nazis and called newspaper columnists “an unnecessary excrescence on our civilization.”) While Roosevelt attacked the press, certain American elites—the president of Columbia University and the president of the American Political Science Association, to name two of the most prominent—were extolling the virtues of fascism.

The point is that American democracy has always been a delicate thing, dependent on many institutions, foremost among them a vigorous and responsible free press. As this book reminds us, without an informed electorate, we risk falling into ignorance, confusion, and fascism. “The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush,” Hutchins later wrote. “It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.”

Permission required for reprinting, reproducing, or other uses.

Scott Stossel  is the national editor of   The Atlantic and the author of   My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind and Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver.

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Video Clip: Democracy and the Role of a Free Press as the Fourth Estate of Government

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Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism Jelani Cobb on democracy and the role of a free press as the fourth estate of government.

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Fourth estate.

The term “fourth estate” has been used to refer to the press since at least the early 1800s. It has become shorth and to denote the role of the public media as a pillar on which the smooth functioning of a democratic society rests, together with the other three estates – legislative, executive, and judiciary. A free press is also a counterbalance to these powers, a watchdog guarding the public interest, and providing a forum for public debate – a public sphere – that underpins the processes of democracy.

Origin Of The Idea

The idea of the fourth estate has a long history, parallel with that of the democratization of political processes, with its origins in the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The origin of the term “fourth estate” is attributed to the eighteenth-century English political philosopher and commentator on the Revolution, Edmund Burke, referring to the three sections of the French Estates-General, an assembly consisting of representatives from the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners (in practice, the bourgeoisie), whose gathering in 1789 is said to have paved the way for the French Revolution. The ideas of freedom and democracy enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, passed by the French National Assembly after the 1789 Revolution, also inspired the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which, in 1791, proclaimed the sanctity of “the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

The term was given wider currency by the nineteenth-century British historian Thomas Carlyle, another great chronicler of the French Revolution: in his book On heroes, hero-worship and the heroic in history, published in 1841, he wrote:

Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact. . . . Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. . . . Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in lawmaking, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures: the requisite thing is that he have a tongue which others will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite. (Carlyle 1841, 141)

In this context, Carlyle was referring to the three estates of the British parliament: the Lords Temporal, the Lords Spiritual, and the House of Commons. The quotation indicates Carlyle’s view of the growing power of newspapers in shaping the public agenda in nineteenth-century Britain as well as acting as a check and balance on the possible abuse of power by the other three pillars of the state. Such champions of liberalism as John Stuart Mill, in his book On liberty, published in 1859, also argued that a liberal press was necessary for “the public good”. According to the German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the wider availability of printing facilities and the resultant reduction in production costs of newspapers stimulated debate in eighteenth-century Britain and led to the emergence of a “bourgeois public sphere,” an arena that was independent of the state and the church, dedicated to rational debate, accessible, and accountable to the citizenry, in which public opinion is formed (Habermas 1989). During the nineteenth century, greater freedom of the press was fought for and achieved in parallel with struggles for parliamentary reform.

The British press had a profound effect on its colonial territories, such as India, where the first regular newspaper, the Bengal Gazette, was founded in 1780 by James Augustus Hicky, an employee of the East India Company, who described the journal as “a weekly political and commercial paper open to all parties, but influenced by none” (quoted in Rau 1974, 10). The Times of India came into existence in 1838, while in 1858 the Straits Times, southeast Asia’s premier newspaper, was started as a daily newspaper from Singapore.

Advances in printing technology meant that newspapers in non-European languages could also be printed and distributed. By the 1870s, more than 140 newspaper titles were in circulation in various Indian languages, representing the linguistic diversity of the subcontinent. Though many of these were launched as commercial enterprises, a growing number were also inspired by a public information and fourth estate function, despite having to operate within undemocratic political systems.

Al-Ahram, the newspaper that has defined Arab journalism for more than a century, was established in Cairo in 1875, while Japan’s most respected newspaper, Asahi Shimbun (“Morning Sun”), was founded in 1890.

A socially responsible agenda was part of the nascent media, and newspapers were also used to articulate the emerging nationalism in many Asian countries.

The Cases Of India And China

Despite strict colonial press laws, which severely curtailed freedom of expression, newspapers played a crucial role in anti-colonial movements, especially in India, where many nationalist leaders were involved in campaigning journalism, most notably Mahatma Gandhi. Writing in Young India (later named Harijan) in 1920, Gandhi, who was to become the “Father of the Nation,” defended the right of newspapers to protest against press laws: “The stoppage of the circulation of potent ideas that may destroy the Government or compel repentance will be the least among the weapons in its armoury. We must therefore devise methods of circulating our ideas unless and until the whole Press becomes fearless, defies consequences and publishes ideas, even when it is in disagreement with them, just for the purpose of securing its freedom” (Gandhi 1970, 59).

The fourth estate function of the media contributed to India’s transformation from a feudal colony to a modern nation-state with a stable, mature, and multiparty democracy. A democratic polity ensured that the government tolerated criticism of its policies on the editorial pages of the national press, providing the space within which the media could engage in critical debates on socio-political and economic issues. More importantly, the proactive and often adversarial role of newspapers contributed to a discourse of social justice through, for example, the evolution of an early-warning system for serious food shortages and thus a preventive mechanism against famine (Ram 1990).

According to the Hindu, India’s most respected newspaper, the long-term Indian press experience, set in larger context, suggests a set of functions that serious newspapers have performed with benefit to society. These are (1) the credible-informational, (2) the critical investigative (“watchdog”), (3) the educational, and (4) the agenda-building functions. Summarizing its own principles, the newspaper said in a special editorial to mark its 125th anniversary, in August 2003: “The Hindu has worked out for itself a set of five principles as a template for socially responsible and ethical journalism. The first is the principle of truth telling. The second principle is that of freedom and independence. The third component of the template is the principle of justice. The fourth principle is that of humaneness. The fifth principle is that of contributing to the social good” (The Hindu 2003, italics in the original).

This fourth estate role of the media was also recognized in China, where the nationalist leader Sun Yat Sen founded Chung-kuo Jih-pao (“China Daily News”) in 1899. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the discourse of Chinese journalism had a marked “social responsibility” bias, with such names as Liang Qichao (1873 –1929), one of the most “exalted editor journalists” in the Chinese world, bringing a “rational and responsible” journalism to the Chinese public sphere (de Burgh 2003, 204).

Threats To The Fourth Estate Role Of The Media

The liberal fourth estate functions of the media were undermined by the state control of media under communism, while in the capitalist world, hypercommercialism, indicated by a ratingsand circulation-driven media system, has eroded the democratic potential of the mass media. During the Cold War years the two competing models of media – state controlled and market driven – set the parameters of the extent to which the media could perform their fourth estate functions. In communist countries as well as in most developing countries they were little more than the mouthpiece of the ruling parties or of dictatorships – whether of rightor left-wing political orientation.

With the globalization of the US model of the media – one largely dependent on commercial advertising – the public interest has come under strain in most countries, evident in the decline and fall of public service media across the world. However, globalization has also provided transnational connectivity, enabling the creation of what has been called a “mediapolis,” defined as the “mediated public space where contemporary political life increasingly finds its place, both at national and global levels, and where the materiality of the world is constructed through (principally) electronically communicated public speech and action” (Silverstone 2007, 24). Unlike Habermas’s conception of the public sphere, with its rational debate and argument, the mediapolis is more inclusive, because within it communication is “multiple and multiply inflected” (Silverstone 2007, 34).

Given the global nature of the Internet, it has emerged as an increasingly important communication forum, providing opportunities for developing and strengthening a transnational network of journalists and information activists to cooperate and exchange ideas. The “journalism domain” within the Internet, it has been argued, “is a core element of the public sphere on the Internet” (Dahlgren 2005, 153). In the age of the Internet, journalists can incorporate various viewpoints in their reports: in foreign reporting such access can be particularly useful in providing more balanced coverage on contentious international issues. It is the case that much of the online connectivity has been colonized for e-commerce, and yet the fourth estate functions, undertaken by activists and information mavericks, have enriched the transnational public discourse by providing alternative voices and perspectives on crucial contemporary issues.

In the 1990s the Internet was used effectively to mobilize international support against the US-sponsored Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), which would have given unfettered powers to transnational corporations to move capital from one country to another. A concerted campaign was able to thwart the MAI. The growing importance of blogging in political communication as well as such “user generated” media outlets as Current TV, the channel made of clips created by viewers and producers and run by Al Gore, the former US vice-president, could be said to be “democratizing the media”. Such globalization of news media has prompted scholars to extend the Habermasian idea of a public sphere into a global arena, facilitated by the unprecedented growth in transnational satellite news networks and online journalism, creating a global public sphere (McNair 2006).

The conception of a single, rational public sphere to promote the fourth estate function appears hard to sustain in the twenty-first century 24/7 multimedia world. In a “globalized public sphere” various versions of the public interest are circulating in a media ecology characterized by increasingly fragmenting and rapidly proliferating news and information outlets (McNair 2006, 143). The notion of a fourth estate too needs to be broadened to take account of our globalized media production and consumption patterns.

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Governing the UK in the 1990s pp 155–176 Cite as

The Mass Media: Fourth Estate or Fifth Column?

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The Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle called the press the ‘Fourth Estate of the Realm’. By this he meant that it acted as a sort of watchdog of the constitution and, as such, formed a vital part of democratic government. Most modern writers would agree that the mass media should play a central role in sustaining and developing democracy: the media should present a full, fair, and accurate account of the news, they should inform and educate the general public, and they should cover a wide range of political opinions and positions (Keane, 1992). Many modern writers, however, are concerned that the mass media no longer play their proper democratic role. They believe that far from being the fourth estate, the media are becoming a sort of fifth column that threatens democracy from within. Some commentators believe that the threat is strongest in Britain. This chapter considers the competing views of fourth estate and fifth column writers in modern Britain.

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Newton, K. (1995). The Mass Media: Fourth Estate or Fifth Column?. In: Pyper, R., Robins, L. (eds) Governing the UK in the 1990s. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23899-6_8

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The brutal reality is that Australia’s media is broken and policy tinkering will not help

The foundations have crumbled and need to be entirely rebuilt if journalism is to play its vital role in our democracy

W hen the owner of the the Cairns Post opened a new office for his newspaper in 1908 he aimed high. The entrance was distinguished by a temple front and nine soaring Ionic columns: incongruently grand symbols, a long way from Greece.

Such was the ambition in far north Queensland in the newly federated Australia, that columns topped with scrolls seemed unremarkable. Cairns was driven, the paper thundered, it did not “want a pawnbroking, huckstering policy of the slow-and-go-easy style ”.

As each new town was gazetted, a newspaper soon followed – generally owned by ambitious men active in local government, politics and property. More than a century later they now are closing.

Cairns’ visitors and residents are reminded that its paper today started just six years after the town itself. Est 1882 is emblazoned on the cornice above the columns. It was one of the scores of newspapers that recorded life in the often-violent frontier settlements .

Australians were voracious readers interested in politics; the colonies developed a global reputation as land of newspapers.

In the globalised 21st century the pattern has reversed. New thinking is needed.

News outlets, in all mediums – generally owned by distant companies – are closing . Queensland is dotted with what the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission calls news deserts. Ten of the 29 local government areas in Australia without a local news publisher are in the state, and nationwide a third of local government areas have fewer news outlets than four years ago .

This decline accelerated when the pandemic began. News Corp spent decades hoovering up papers in Queensland but then closed 15, digitised and scaled back 96 others around the nation. Australian Community Newspapers “ retired ” 36 mastheads, websites and social media sites.

Australia is no longer a land of newspapers, but one where gossip and misinformation flourish.

The early enthusiasm for newspapers was not reflected in the Australian constitution. There was no recognition of freedom of the press, or freedom of speech, commonplace in other framing documents at the time. Indeed, it took the high court eight decades to find an implied right of political communication in the nation’s founding document.

But an emotional attachment to the idea of the press as the fourth estate lives on.

Shifting this ideal to something that is robust and puts the wellbeing of the nation and its citizens first has proved politically impossible, ever since television licences were granted to newspaper owners. Australia has set global records for media ownership concentration.

Almost every prime minister since Robert Menzies has shared his assessment that he was constrained by the self-interest of the proprietors .

Therein lies the gritty truth about Australia’s media tradition. It has always been motivated more by commerce than democracy. Regulators evaluated each new takeover with a greater focus on what it would mean for advertising than for journalism or democracy.

The democratic role of the press was acknowledged in passing, but few owners took their eyes off the real commercial power that owning a newspaper bestows, as Sally Young has documented in her magnificent books, Paper Emperors and Media Monsters .

Journalists became more professional and assertive, and independent public broadcasters pushed back, but it was an unequal battle. It was only in 2019 when the ACCC documented that the overwhelming majority of advertising had left the traditional media for digital platforms that the essential, cross-subsidised role of public interest journalism was elevated in policy terms.

The tension in this essential truth is again on display as the government wrings its hands about what to do in response to Meta’s unilateral decision to downgrade news and cease paying the $70m a year to media companies under the News Media Bargaining Code. Critics contend the code was another shakedown by the old media businesses with the aid of the government, but much of the money found its way into journalism.

The brutal reality is the old models don’t work and tinkering at the edges won’t solve the fundamental problem if we really want the news media to be an adjunct of democracy.

Australia needs a wide-ranging public inquiry into the sort of media we need and deserve. An inquiry that is bigger than Murdoch, Meta and the public broadcasters, but includes them all.

It’s unfair to expect the new chair of the ABC, Kim Williams , to fix its many problems, the foundations of the whole sector have fundamentally changed and need to be rebuilt.

Governments need to take the challenge of the moment very seriously, not with a “slow-and-go easy style” or “huckstering, pawn-broking policy”.

A little over a century after the Cairns Post’s columns grew in unlikely soil, News Corp sold the building for $4m . The council did not constrain the sale by supporting its nomination for the Queensland Heritage Register. The temple of another age will soon be incorporated into, and dwarfed by, an eight-story apartment complex, “a poster child for tropical urbanism” , where people will struggle to find the robust information they need to make sense of the world and imagine the future.

Julianne Schultz AM is the author of Reviving the Fourth Estate: Media, Accountability and Democracy. She has been a member of the board of the ABC and chair of the Conversation.

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THE MEDIA AS FOURTH ESTATE OF THE REALM

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Abdullahi Bashir

afolabi muyiwa

Impact Factor(JCC): 1.3648-This article can be downloaded from www.impactjournals.us ABSTRACT The third estate of the realm are the three organs of government namely; legislature, executive and judiciary while the fourth estate is the mass media which serves as watchdog over three principal of government. The anti-press rule which operates prior to the rebirth of democracy in May 29, 1999 seems to repeal the freedom of unhindered flow of information in Nigeria. This study therefore examines the relationship between democracy and fourth estate. The study adopts libertarian theory of the press as framework of analysis and secondary data was mostly used due to the nature of the study. The study argues that efficiency of fourth estate of the realm is necessary for survival of democracy of any country. It equally identifies some positive development that took place within the period of the study. In spite of the feat of fourth estate and democracy in Nigeria, some challenges were identified. The study recommends the effective implementation of the Freedom of Information law which is capable of addressing the major lacuna between democracy and fourth estate of the realm.

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Democracy, which consists of the combination of demos meaning "people" in the Greek language and kratos meaning "administration", means management of the people. However, a model in which the public directly shapes the management process is not available at any time in modern history. Therefore, it's more realistic to express democracy as a management model in which the real representatives of the people have the power to make decisions. Cincotta (2013), also explains Democracy as, "Democracy…is defined, basically, as government in which the supreme power is vested in the people. In some forms, democracy can be exercised directly by the people; in large societies, it's by the people through their elected agents, Or, in the memorable phrase of President Abraham Lincoln, democracy is government of the people, by the people, and for the people" (p.1). One of the factors that strengthens democracy is the media. As Ababa (2019) indicates, free, objective and competent media-plays a vital role in democracy. Media delivers information that allows voters to make informed choices within and outside the voting booth as well as can also contribute to the political process by encouraging politicians to respond to the citizens and to work on subjects of actual public interest. (p.9) In the light of Ababa's arguments, we could say that media is the tool that bridges between people and the government along with contributes to the democratic conduct of the state. There is a strong dependency between the media and democracy. The media institution is supposed to function as an informing authority and must mediate between government and citizens, among the politicians, also enables the communication between the citizens. Moreover, to give a place for freedom of expression. Lastly, to be the fourth arm of the

Ndonima U H W E Danjuma

The work examined the features of democracy and how the media has contributed to the attainment of democracy in Nigeria. The work is anchored on the agenda setting, framing and priming theories of the mass media. The impact of mass media in sustainable democracy in Nigeria cannot be overemphasized. Therefore, mass media must look for avenues to improve on the quality of information they disseminate in order to sustain Nigeria's democracy. The Nigerian media has an important role to play in this present democratic dispensation by allowing for orderly succession of civilian to civilian administration. It is by so doing that democracy can fully be sustained and beyond.

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This paper explores the relationship between political power and democracy. It was published Social Research 77, 4: 1049-1074.

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Democracy as a concept has become a common term among the generality of Nigerian citizens as a result of its frequent usage in the media. Although in the real sense of it, it has brought little dividends to Nigerians. In spite of its popular acceptance as the most favourable form of government in the world, the media in Nigeria has portrayed democracy in an uninspiring manner because of the greed, corruption and nepotism of Nigerian politicians thereby making the political communication of democracy as government of the people by the people and for the people unimpressive. Therefore, this paper examines the linkage between the media and democratic governance in Nigeria. It seeks to understand the ills that the media had caused to the democratic governance in Nigeria through sensational coverage of political events. The paper relied on secondary sources of data collection; and it is descriptive and explanatory in nature. The study anchored on Political Communication theory and Agenda...

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Guest Essay

My Country Is Witnessing a Messy, Buffoonish End of Rule

By Boubacar Boris Diop

Mr. Diop is a Senegalese novelist, journalist and screenwriter. He wrote from Dakar, Senegal.

On Dec. 31, 1980, Léopold Sédar Senghor , the first president of Senegal, announced that he was leaving power. At 74, he felt that his time was up. When courtiers tried to convince him to reverse his decision, he reportedly replied, with a smile: “Don’t you know how the Senegalese are? If I go back on my word, they’ll laugh at me.” His act was especially remarkable at a time when dictators for life were common across the African continent. Even if his political record remains controversial to this day, Mr. Senghor, a fervent Catholic poet, was open-minded enough to lead a majority Muslim country and even managed to make it a model of stability in the region.

Things are very different today. In Mr. Senghor’s homeland, we are in the midst of a messy and at times buffoonish end of rule that threatens to capsize the country’s hard-won equilibrium. In early February, President Macky Sall, approaching the end of his two terms in office, postponed an election set for later that month. The move immediately plunged Senegal into disarray, setting off widespread protests, parliamentary chaos and a full-blown constitutional crisis. In one of the very few African countries never to have experienced a military coup , the last-minute postponement felt tantamount to a coup d’état.

If Mr. Sall’s gambit was to remain in power, it didn’t work. Into the vacuum stepped the constitutional council, the country’s highest court, which ruled that the delay was illegal . Backed into a corner, Mr. Sall eventually agreed to leave office on April 2 and the election was rearranged for March 24 , this Sunday. For Mr. Sall, holed up in the presidential palace he was so loath to leave, it marks an embarrassing reversal, to say the least. But for Senegal it is much more serious. The country’s destiny, entrusted to Mr. Sall for 12 years, is now in danger.

Since committing not to run for a third term last summer, Mr. Sall has never been quite the same. He has become irritable, humiliating his ministers in public and naming boulevards after himself. Let down by his own people and his traditional Western supporters, he gave vent to his anger in a February speech with a very strong Wolof expression — “Doyal naa ci sëkk!” — which can be politely translated as: “I’m more than fed up with this power, take it back whenever you want!”

Such a disastrous end to Mr. Sall’s career is all the more perplexing given that he had very good intentions at the outset. In April 2012, two weeks after his swearing-in, he announced from the Élysée Palace in France his decision to reduce presidential terms of office from seven to five years. After the change was eventually upheld in a referendum , applying to his second term rather than his first, Mr. Sall seemed to have honored his word. But his subterfuge in recent weeks suggests that, in the end, even this dream was too big for him.

This post-independence president, the fourth to hold the office, is the first to be so often called a dictator. Is he one? The answer is no, when you consider the carnage being perpetrated by Mahamat Idriss Déby’s regime in Chad, for example. I’m well aware, however, that this kind of comparison not only leads nowhere but is also rather dangerous. Each country must be judged on the basis of its own history, and it would be very sad to end up congratulating ourselves on having fewer dead bodies in the streets of Dakar than in those of Ndjamena.

Nevertheless, the man who vowed in April 2015 to all but eliminate the opposition has shown himself to be increasingly authoritarian and violent in the past three years. After turning the opposition leader, Ousmane Sonko, into a mythical figure by demonizing and imprisoning him, Mr. Sall brutally repressed all demonstrations in his support. Since March 2021, when Mr. Sonko was arrested, security forces have killed at least 40 young protesters. For good measure, the government threw 1,000 activists in prison, including Bassirou Diomaye Faye, another leading opposition figure. Credible reports of torture have not been investigated.

It’s a lot of collateral for Mr. Sall’s ultimately failed attempt to outstay his welcome. His detractors would like to see him prosecuted by international justice but, in the world as it is, this seems unlikely. Senegalese civil society, though, may demand that whoever succeeds Mr. Sall hold him accountable for his actions. That’s where a new amnesty law passed by Parliament in early March could prove crucial. The law, which pardons acts committed in connection with political unrest since March 2021, has led to Mr. Sonko and Mr. Faye, who is a candidate in the election, both being freed . But many fear that it could be also used to protect the security forces and, of course, Mr. Sall himself.

For now, the constitutional council has succeeded in calming things down, but Senegalese democrats shouldn’t sing victory too soon. The worst — contested results setting off violently repressed protests, for example, amid the threat of military involvement and foreign interference — could be still to come. Even if the election goes smoothly, it’s hard to imagine certain high-profile figures in the presidential camp allowing themselves to be held to account by the next administration without a major reaction. There could well be more trouble ahead.

But whatever happens, these three years of turmoil may not have been in vain. Senegalese citizens are now more aware of the strengths and weaknesses of their democracy — and it is reasonable to assume that no future president, unless he has lost his mind, will try to serve more than two terms. This is a great thing, but it could have been achieved without disgracing the country and creating this much grief.

Indeed, the debates about Mr. Sall’s successor have rarely gone beyond speculation about who will soon occupy the presidential palace. The question of what the winner intends to do for the country is almost never raised. In the lead-up to Sunday’s election, many voters will have only a vague idea of the programs and capabilities of the many different candidates. As things stand, there is every reason to be concerned about the near future. Only one person is responsible for this uncertainty: Mr. Sall, the man who turned his back on the history of his people.

Boubacar Boris Diop is a Senegalese novelist, journalist and screenwriter. He is the author, among other books, of “Murambi, the Book of Bones” and the winner of the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

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