International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

The term “fourth estate” has been used to refer to the press since at least the early 1800s. It has become shorthand 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. 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 ... log in or subscribe to read full text