Fourth Estate

The term Fourth Estate or fourth power refers to the press and news media both in explicit capacity of advocacy and implicit ability to frame political issues. Though it is not formally recognized as a part of a political system, it wields significant indirect social influence. The derivation of the term fourth estate arises from the traditional European concept of the three estates of the realm: the clergy, the nobility and the commoners. The equivalent term fourth power is somewhat uncommon in English, but it is used in many European languages (see for example de:Vierte Gewalt, es:Cuarto poder and fr:Quatrième pouvoir) referring to the separation of powers in government into a legislature, an executive and a judiciary. Thomas Carlyle attributed the origin of the term to Edmund Burke, who used it in a parliamentary debate in 1787 on the opening up of press reporting of the House of Commons of Great Britain. Earlier writers have applied the term to lawyers, to the British queens consort (acting as a free agent, independent of the king), and to the proletariat. In modern use, the term is applied to the press, with the earliest use in this sense described by Thomas Carlyle in his book On Heroes and Hero Worship: 'Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.' In Burke's 1787 coining, he would have been making reference to the traditional three estates of Parliament: The Lords Spiritual, the Lords Temporal and the Commons. If, indeed, Burke did make the statement Carlyle attributes to him, the remark may have been in the back of Carlyle's mind when he wrote in his French Revolution (1837) that 'A Fourth Estate, of Able Editors, springs up; increases and multiplies, irrepressible, incalculable.' In this context, the other three estates are those of the French States-General: the church, the nobility and the townsmen. Carlyle, however, may have mistaken his attribution: Thomas Macknight, writing in 1858, observes that Burke was merely a teller at the 'illustrious nativity of the Fourth Estate'. If Burke is excluded, other candidates for coining the term are Henry Brougham speaking in Parliament in 1823 or 1824 and Thomas Macaulay in an essay of 1828 reviewing Hallam's Constitutional History: 'The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.' In 1821, William Hazlitt (whose son, also named William Hazlitt, was another editor of Michel de Montaigne—see below) had applied the term to an individual journalist, William Cobbett, and the phrase soon became well established. Oscar Wilde wrote: In United States English, the phrase 'fourth estate' is contrasted with the 'fourth branch of government', a term that originated because no direct equivalents to the estates of the realm exist in the United States. The 'fourth estate' is used to emphasize the independence of the press, while the 'fourth branch' suggests that the press is not independent of the government. Yochai Benkler, author of the 2006 book The Wealth of Networks, described the 'Networked Fourth Estate' in a May 2011 paper published in the Harvard Civil Liberties Review. He explains the growth of non-traditional journalistic media on the Internet and how it affects the traditional press using WikiLeaks as an example. When Benkler was asked to testify in the United States vs. PFC Bradley E. Manning trial, in his statement to the morning 10 July 2013 session of the trial he described the Networked Fourth Estate as the set of practices, organizing models, and technologies that are associated with the free press and provide a public check on the branches of government.:28–29 It differs from the traditional press and the traditional fourth estate in that it has a diverse set of actors instead of a small number of major presses. These actors include small for-profit media organizations, non-profit media organizations, academic centers, and distributed networks of individuals participating in the media process with the larger traditional organizations.:99–100