“Yonder sits the Fourth Estate, and they are more important than them all.”
This is what Edmund Burke, a British politician, observed while looking up at the Press Gallery of the House of Commons sometime after the French Revolution.
The ‘them all’ refers to the three estates - the Lords Temporal (aristocracy), the Lords Spiritual (priesthood) and the Commons (commoners).
Primarily taking a leaf out of Thomas Carlyle’s ‘Heroes and Hero Worship in History’, where he states the inevitable existence of democracy with the macrocosm of writing, he also went on to say how the status of the ‘wagging’ tongue doesn’t matter, but the power which the tongue holds over the wide audience listening to it is the key. Anyone with the power to address the mass, holds power over them.
So what is this Fourth Estate, after the brief introduction to being more important than the executive, legislative and judiciary systems? The phrase, originally used as a synonym for newspapers, has now been broadened to include all of what is known as the mass media.
Thus, the term 'fourth estate' is used today to refer to the mass media as a powerful watchdog in liberal democracy, revealing abuses of state authority and defending the democratic rights of citizens.
Now two modes of attacks are faced by the mass media - from within the broadly Marxist vein of critical theory they are criticized for reproducing the dominant bourgeois culture, and from within the 'political economy' vein of research, they are found guilty for representing the interests of those who own them.
In tune with the pluralist liberal democracy, the common assumption would be that the media be independent of the state; i.e., not be the state’s poodle but operate in a free market organization.
Jürgen Habermas stated long before the (vague) presence of the ‘public sphere’ during the 18th century, but a revival of it may in fact, be evident. Take the recent splash of T.V. talk-shows, the general dissatisfaction of the public and the upheaval of citizen journalism, this idea is golden!