On air at 1700 GMT: Who is The Fourth Estate?
This topic was discussed on World Have Your Say on 8 July, 2011. Listen to the programme.
It's been a difficult week for journalism, and the dust is far from settling on the . It's left many asking some very difficult questions of the media. What is the media for? It's a simple question, but this affair has given it a sharp sense of urgency.
The media has long been thought of as . It's a term based on how the ancién regime in France divided society. The First Estate was the clergy, The Second Estate the nobles, and the third was everyone else. Come the eighteenth century, thinkers like Thomas Carlyle were talking about a Fourth estate, the media, which exists to hold the rest of society to account. Now if we take David Cameron at his word, the Fourth Estate is now derelict. If this is true, what can emerge from the ruins? How can the media regain people's trust? Or should we accept that an alternative is growing, with people using social media to become the world's watchdog?
It's something that has been blogging about. He argues that traditional media has the monopoly to decide what is investigated, and they've failed to use it properly:
They have been unable or unwilling to use this monopoly power in the public interest... Each of us must take some some fraction of the commissioning power, the power to initiate and publish inquiries.
writes that many UK MPs are hoping that the events of the past few days show the decline of print media, something that will:
Permanently shift the balance away from the unelected to the elected. With most newspaper circulation charts going south, they see the broadcast media ... and even the internet as the alternative future.
But he warns us not to get too excited:
The press remains incredibly powerful, not least because it's the place that (non-phone hacked) exclusives are broken and where the sheer numbers of consumers cannot be ignored.
After all the newspaper The Guardian did lead the charge in exposing the phone hacking that was going on at The News of the World. And Wikileaks relied on newspapers to collate and present their information.
So who is The Fourth Estate today? Do you trust the media to hold politicians to account? Or is social media taking over this treasured role?
