Suite101 e-Book
The Fourth Estate

Introduction

The phrase the Fourth Estate was originally a synonym for newspapers. With the dawn of radio, television, and news magazines the meaning broadened to ‘all of mass media.’ Edmund Burke (1729-97), son of a Dublin attorney and statesman, said “there were three Estates in Parliament, but in the Reporters Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.”

The Fourth Estate refers to the profession of Journalism as it relates to the free press. It is a spin-off of the old English Feudal ideology of three estates (social classes). The ‘First Estate’ referred to the Church or clergy (people who prayed); the ‘Second Estate’ referred to Nobility (people who fought [knights]); and the ‘Third Estate’ consisted of Peasantry or everyone else (people who produced food in support of people who prayed or fought [First and Second Estate members]). It was not unusual for aristocrats to enter the Church and shift from the second to the first estate. The estates were defined by what you did and by social classes derived from birth.

The First Estate was called the Lords Spiritual or members of the House of Lords. The Second Estate was called the Lords Temporal or members who were hereditary peers, Law Lords, or Lords appointed for life. The Third Estate was called the House of Commons or the lower house, meaning the people’s house. The Fourth Estate as a respondent to the first three estates rests on the idea that media’s function is to act as a guardian of the public interest and as a watchdog of the activities of government.

In 1750 Burke entered Middle Temple, London (the legal district), but later he abandoned law for literary work. He coined the term the ‘Fourth Estate’ and published A Vindication of Natural Society. He became secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham, who was then premier. Afterward, Burke entered parliament as a Whig. Throughout most of his parliamentary years he sat in opposition benches as a critic to the ruling Tories. Burke believed that journalists had a power all their own in government. This was the power to speak and the power to make others listen through the printed word. He believed these powers acted as check and balance to the other estates by upholding democracy and defending public interests.

A Scotsman, Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), who believed in the power of the individual, vehemently distrusted democracy, hated industrialists, and distrusted social legislators, furthered the definition of the Fourth Estate in a quote from his book, Heroes and Hero Worship in History (1841) where he referenced the Fourth Estate as ‘the Mob’ or the ‘Able Editors’ of the free press. Carlye also wrote The French Revolution in 1837 (for which he is better known) and defined the passing by in silence of the very large and powerful body that formed the Fourth Estate in this community.

Centuries later (in 1969), at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay (UWGB), a student, Pat Madden (the then editor of the University’s Bay Badger newspaper and now an Iron County circuit court judge) renamed their news publication from the Bay Badger to the Fourth Estate. Madden stated, “Those who wrote the letters have the gist of it: newspapers have a certain duty to keep an eye on government, but as a college newspaper, we also have a duty to entertain students, and keep them up to date on important happenings.”

Since Madden's reference of the Fourth Estate, the estate itself has become more and more of a novel modern concept in our current era. In past centuries, it was agreed among elitists, that it was dangerous to the social orders for the lower classes to administer the printing presses. The privileged opinion (recorded in parliamentary debates in 1832) held that stakeholders in society would conduct newspapers “in a more responsible manner than was likely to be the result of paupers in management.” Merchant reformers who wanted to run the printing presses stressed the importance of engineering broad social consent through the press, with desire for private profits to ride higher than altruistic notions of democracy or diversity in statement. As Lord Chancellor stated in 1834: “The only question to answer, and the only problem to solve, is how they [the people] shall read in the best manner; how they shall be instructed politically, and have political habits formed the most safe for the constitution of the country.” It was hoped that the Fourth Estate would be quieted and that the press would be used to keep the masses under the decision-making rule of the first two estate classes.

A press tax reformation campaign that proved successful in the 1850s to 1860s resulted in a free market period where industrialization, commercialization, and reliance on advertising revenues emerged. The radical press offered cheap newspapers and views while maintaining the status quo and the elitist social order seized power; the autonomy and neutrality of the free presses lost meaning during this era. Structural changes in the press encouraged eradication of the early radical press. The radical press closed down, gave in to advertising pressure by marketing to upwardly mobile readership, by remaining small, and by absorbing manageable losses or accepted alternative sources of patronage.

The belief that the press was free and independent arose by the mid-nineteenth century when businessmen maintained the capitalist order. The mainstream press was then weakened somewhat and maintained a defense in the stability of the state, which later evolved to a society that admitted no conflict of class interest, conflict between ignorance and enlightenment, conflict between the individual and the state, and later provided the intellectual framework where the free press could be perceived as a watch dog of government and guardian of the people.

It is in this evolution that the Fourth Estate has blossomed in recent years as a new ‘catch phrase’ regarding the estates of social hierarchy. The Fourth Estate is the watch dog of liberty and freedom. This e-anthology references the Fourth Estate in abundant topics relative to media and journalism. The chapters that follow address a sample of Fourth Estate topics of interest for participants from any estates of present day. We hope you enjoy this anthology and you will note the term Fourth Estate Guardians (FEGs) has been coined herein.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• The Fourth Estate
• Simple Language, Plain Rhetoric: Dumbing Down of Literature
• Viral Impressions of Gifted Minds
• Congressional Impetus Toward Fahrenheit
• The Investigative Writer
• Cryptic Language and the Art of Communication
• The Divine Art
• The State of the Fourth Estate
• Cyber Security and the Fourth Estate
• Memes
• Readability Standards, IQ and the Fourth Estate
• Readability Standards, IQ, and The Fourth Estate, Part Two
• Works Cited