Press/Fourth Estate Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The term the press refers to the idea that the major news media outlets in a country, taken together, perform important functions necessary for governance, acting collectively as an important institution alongside the official governmental institutions. The phrase fourth estate first appeared in print from Thomas Carlyle in 1837 in reference to the revolutionary war in France, where Carlyle suggested that the “able editors” of the newspapers played an equal role to the recognized three estates of prerevolutionary French government: the church, the nobility, and the bourgeoisie or commoners. Carlyle attributes this phrase to Edmund Burke, who he quotes as saying there were three estates in the British parliament, but that the reporters’ gallery was an estate more powerful than them all.

Press/Fourth Estate In The American Political System

The phrase fourth estate has translated well into American politics, with the suggestion that in addition to the three official branches of government—the executive, legislative, and judicial branches—the press acts as a fourth branch of government. In this conception, the press is expected to provide a conduit of communication between the government and the people, relaying all-important information about government to the citizens, and also to be a watchdog, or provide checks and balances on the three official branches of government. There is some indication that the Founders of the United States shared this view, in that freedom of the press is provided for in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and subsequent court decisions have expanded the freedom of the press.

U.S. free press protections expanded on those traditional under British law in preventing the press’ prior restraint on publication of information and allowing only for prosecution after the information was disseminated. Since this time, all major democracies have adopted protections of freedom of the press, in recognition that the media play important roles in democratic governance. Despite these protections and perhaps the intentions of democratic governments to delegate these duties to the media, scholars have suggested that the media, and especially commercial media driven by profit motives, are ill-suited for performing these functions in a democracy.

Models Of Government And Press Relations In Democratic Societies

Scholars have identified three models of media as political institutions in Western democracies. The liberal model is the most prominent model, typified by the United States, Canada, and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom. In the liberal model, the government exerts very little influence over the media in terms of content, and, in the case of the United States, in terms of funding. In all liberal model countries, there are laws preventing the government from interfering in the production and dissemination of news, with the U.S. First Amendment protections the strongest in this realm. Political parallelism, or the connections between the press and the major political parties, is low in liberal countries, allowing the press to be independent and critical of all parties. In most cases, the press follows norms of internal pluralism—also known as the objective model—whereby the major viewpoints on an issue present in society are included within a story. Commercial media dominate in liberal model countries, though the government may make significant investments in public broadcasting, as occurs in the United Kingdom and Canada. Though fewer governmental restrictions and plentiful funding through commercial sources allow the mass media to be critical of government and to investigate government wrongdoing and corruption, research has demonstrated that government officials have a strong influence on the content of the mass media in liberal model countries.

A second model, the polarized pluralist model, is characterized by strong state intervention, both in terms of content and funding. The primary audience of the press in polarized pluralist countries is elites, and there is a high degree of political parallelism, with newspapers or television programs often representing the views of a particular political party. Reporters generally present only one viewpoint in their stories; external pluralism of views is provided at the level of the media system, with different outlets presenting differing views. Spain and Italy are examples of countries where the media institutions developed along this model. In this conception, the role of the media is to foster communication within political parties, and from the government to the people. The watchdog role is less prominent.

The third model scholars have identified is the democratic corporatist model. This model is characterized by a coexistence of government-sponsored media and commercial media. Sweden and the Netherlands provide examples of this model. In these media systems, the level of political parallelism is between that found in the liberal model and the polarized pluralist model, with newspapers and broadcasts representing the positions of particular social groups, rather than specific political parties. This system rejects the objective model and operates according to the norms of external pluralism, where each social group expresses its views through particular outlets. In democratic corporatist countries, discussions about the role of the media involve balancing the watchdog role with the role of promoting communication within and between particular social groups. To this end, the government provides heavy subsidies for public broadcasting and regulates media content in regards to issues such as hate speech in order to maintain civil dialogue.

All of these models represent different ways in which media can develop as a set of political institutions within a democratic system. In each system, the media perform critical functions of communicating information from the government to the citizens, from citizens back to the government, and fostering discussion among citizens about politics. These models vary in their focus on these roles.

Criticisms Of The Press/Fourth Estate Concept

The idea of looking at the media as a fourth estate or at the press as an institution in government has been criticized for failing to take into account the wide variety of norms across media organizations in the same country, and for attributing motives to collective news organizations rather than to individual journalists.

Bibliography:

Bennett,W. Lance. News: Politics of Illusion. White Plains, N.Y.: Longman, 2001.
Boyce, George. “The Fourth Estate:The Reappraisal of a Concept.” In Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day. Edited by George Boyce, James Curran, and Pauline Wingate, 19–40. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1978.
Cater, Douglass. The Fourth Branch of Government. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959.
Cook,Timothy. Governing with the News:The News Media as a Political Institution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Hallin, Daniel C., and Paolo Mancini. Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

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