Fourth Estate

The Fourth Estate (or fourth power) is a segment of society that wields an indirect but significant influence on society even though it is not a formally recognized part of the political system.[1] The most commonly recognized part of the fourth estate is the news media, or press.

The term fourth estate derives from 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 is used in many European languages (see: fr:Quatrième pouvoir) referring to the separation of powers in government into a legislature, an executive, and a judiciary.

Origins

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.[2] 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.

The press

In current use, the term is applied to the press,[3] 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."[4]

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.[5] 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."[6] In this context, the other three estates are those of the French States-General: the church, the nobility and the townsmen.[5] 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".[7] If Burke is excluded, other candidates for coining the term are Henry Brougham speaking in Parliament in 1823 or 1824[8] 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."[9] 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.[10][11]

Oscar Wilde wrote:

In old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralizing. Somebody — was it Burke? — called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time no doubt. But at the present moment it is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism.[12]

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.[13]

The networked Fourth Estate

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.[14] 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.[15][16][17]: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.[15]:99–100

Alternative meanings

In European law

In 1580 Montaigne proposed that governments should hold in check a fourth estate of lawyers selling justice to the rich and denying it to rightful litigants who do not bribe their way to a verdict:[18][19]

What is more barbarous than to see a nation [...] where justice is lawfully denied him, that hath not wherewithall [sic] to pay for it; and that this merchandize hath so great credit, that in a politicall government there should be set up a fourth estate [tr. French: quatriesme estat (old orthography), quatrième état (modern)] of Lawyers, breathsellers and pettifoggers [...].
— Michel de Montaigne, in the translation by John Florio, 1603

Nigeria

In the context of Nigeria, the fourth estate refers to the news media with the first three estates referring to the three arms of government; the executive, the legislature and the judiciary.

The proletariat

Il quarto stato (1901): a march of strikers in Turin, Italy

An early citation for this is Henry Fielding in The Covent Garden Journal (1752):

None of our political writers ... take notice of any more than three estates, namely, Kings, Lords, and Commons ... passing by in silence that very large and powerful body which form the fourth estate in this community ... The Mob.[20]

(This is an early use of "mob" to mean the mobile vulgus, the common masses.)

This sense has prevailed in other countries: In Italy, for example, striking workers in 1890s Turin were depicted as Il quarto stato—The Fourth Estate—in a painting by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo.[21] A political journal of the left, Quarto Stato, published in Milan, Italy, in 1926, also reflected this meaning.[22]

Far-right theorist Julius Evola saw the Fourth Estate as the final point of his historical cycle theory, the regression of the castes:

[T]here are four stages: in the first stage, the elite has a purely spiritual character, embodying what may be generally called "divine right." This elite expresses an ideal of immaterial virility. In the second stage, the elite has the character of warrior nobility; at the third stage we find the advent of oligarchies of a plutocratic and capitalistic nature, such as they arise in democracies; the fourth and last elite is that of the collectivist and revolutionary leaders of the Fourth Estate.
— Julius Evola, Men Among The Ruins, p. 164

British queens consort

In a parliamentary debate of 1789 Thomas Powys, 1st Baron Lilford, MP, demanded of minister William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham that he should not allow powers of regency to "a fourth estate: the queen".[23] This was reported by Burke, who, as noted above, went on to use the phrase with the meaning of "press".

Fiction

In his novel The Fourth Estate, Jeffrey Archer wrote: "In May 1789, Louis XVI summoned to Versailles a full meeting of the 'Estates General'. The First Estate consisted of three hundred clergy. The Second Estate, three hundred nobles. The Third Estate, six hundred commoners." The book is a fictionalization from episodes in the lives of two real-life Press Barons, Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ "fourth estate". Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House. Retrieved Jun 28, 2017.
  2. ↑ Schultz, Julianne (1998). Reviving the fourth estate. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. p. 49. ISBN 978-0-521-62970-6.
  3. ↑ "estate, n, 7b". Oxford English Dictionary (2 ed.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. 1989.
  4. ↑ Carlyle, Thomas (19 May 1840). "Lecture V: The Hero as Man of Letters. Johnson, Rousseau, Burns". On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History. Six Lectures. Reported with emendations and additions (Dent, 1908 ed.). London: James Fraser. p. 392. OCLC 2158602.
  5. 1 2 OED: "estate, n, 6a"
  6. ↑ "The French Revolution". London: Griffith Farrane Browne. pp. 146–148. Retrieved 12 November 2009. |chapter= ignored (help)
  7. ↑ Macknight, Thomas (1858). History of the life and times of Edmund Burke. 1. London: Chapman and Hall. p. 462. OCLC 3565018.
  8. ↑ Ross, Charles (9 June 1855). "Replies to Minor Queries". Notes and Queries. London: William Thoms. 11 (294): 452. Ross (October 1800–6 December 1884) was chief parliamentary reporter for The Times.
  9. ↑ Macaulay, Thomas (September 1828). "Hallam's constitutional history". The Edinburgh Review. London: Longmans. 48: 165.
  10. ↑ Hazlitt, William (1835). Character of W. Cobbett M. P. Finsbury, London: J Watson. p. 3. OCLC 4451746. He is too much for any single newspaper antagonist...He is a kind of fourth estate in the politics of the country.
  11. ↑ de Montaigne, Michel; Cotton, Charles (1680). Hazlitt, William, ed. The Complete Works of Michael de Montaigne (1842 ed.). London: J Templeman.
  12. ↑ Wilde, Oscar (February 1891). "The Soul of Man under Socialism". Fortnightly Review. 49 (290): 292–319.
  13. ↑ Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon. Unreliable Sources (New York, NY: Lyle Stuart, 1990) ISBN 0-8184-0521-X
  14. ↑ Benkler, Yochai (2011). "Free Irresponsible Press: Wikileaks and the Battle over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate" (PDF). Harv. CR-CLL Rev. 46: 311. Retrieved 11 July 2013.
  15. 1 2 "US vs Bradley Manning, Volume 17 July 10, 2013 Afternoon Session" (PDF). Freedom of the Press Foundation: Transcripts from Bradley Manning's Trial. 10 July 2013. Retrieved 18 June 2014.
  16. ↑ https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/sites/default/files/07-10-13-pm-session.pdf
  17. ↑ "US vs Bradley Manning, Volume 17 July 10, 2013 Morning Session" (PDF). Freedom of the Press Foundation: Transcripts from Bradley Manning's Trial. 10 July 2013. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-07-12. Retrieved 18 June 2014.
  18. ↑ John Florio (tr.) (1603), Michel de Montaigne, 1, Folio Society (published 2006), p. 104
  19. ↑ For a more recent translation, see Hazlitt's edition of 1842:"What can be more outrageous than to see a nation where, by lawful custom, the office of a Judge is to be bought and sold, where judgments are paid for with ready money, and where justice may be legally denied him that has not the wherewithal [sic] to pay...a fourth estate of wrangling lawyers to add to the three ancient ones of the church, nobility and people, which fourth estate, having the laws in their hands, and sovereign power over men's lives and fortunes, make a body separate from the nobility." (Hazlitt 1842: 45)
  20. ↑ Fielding, Henry (13 June 1752). "O ye wicked rascallions". Covent Garden Journal. London (47)., Quoted in OED "estate, n, 7b".
  21. ↑ Paulicelli, Eugenia (2001). Barański, Zygmunt G.; West, Rebecca J., eds. The Cambridge companion to modern Italian culture. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. p. 248. ISBN 978-0-521-55982-9. For his painting, Pellizza transferred the action to his home village of Volpedo.
  22. ↑ Pugliese, Stanislao G. (1999). Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. pp. 67–69. ISBN 978-0-674-00053-7.
  23. ↑ Edmund Burke, ed. (1792). Dodsley's Annual Register for 1789. 31. London: J Dodsley. p. 112. The Whigs in parliament supported the transfer of power to the Regent, rather than the sick king's consort, Queen Charlotte.
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