Many media watchdogs will tell you large media organizations have become skilled at perpetuating, and sometimes even creating myths: Notable detractors Bernard Goldberg and John Stossel, each with new books touching on the subject, come to mind.
As example, if you asked someone about economic aid to Third World countries in Africa, you’d likely hear about billions of dollars the U.S. and others give every year. What you won’t hear is that most of it ends up in the hands of corrupt kleptocracies, with little, if any, getting to the people it’s intended to help.
And who can forget the major non-story leading up to the Presidential Election of 2004: the infamous National Guard Memoranda that never were.
Even today, major media’s reporting on events in Haditha appears well on the way to creating a possible myth months before results of a formal investigation are ever known.
But even that potentially explosive myth may not be the most damaging myth our so-called Fourth Estate is currently being allowed to perpetuate. There’s good reason to argue they were never entitled to claim the moniker the Fourth Estate, nor any inherent privilege that goes with it.
Conventional wisdom holds that Thomas Carlyle first referred to journalists as the Fourth Estate, attributing the remark to Edmund Burke. “Burke said there were three Estates in Parliament, but in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important than they all” (Hero-worship, 1841).
But the real story of the Fourth Estate neither begins, nor ends there.
A recent book by high-profile blogger Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, “An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths,” suggests that technology has a tremendous potential to transform, among other things, media, as “a society that’s rich and free will have citizens who — entirely on their own —develop a wide range of skills.”
Reynolds has recently added podcasting to his blog and has already conducted interviews featuring prominent news figures such as RNC Chair Ken Mehlman, Senate candidate Rep. Harold Ford Jr., D-Tenn., and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.
Last year, when a major government scandal broke in Canada, “AdsScam,” which many argue led to the ouster of the Liberal Party in Canada, the Canadian government enacted a publication ban on significant testimony concerning the case. A blogger, Ed Morrisey of Captain’s Quarters, led the news coverage by providing in-depth reporting despite the ban.
Blogger Bill Roggio left the relatively safe confines of New Jersey to embed with military units in Iraq and continues to provide ongoing reports from the front at the Counterterrorism blog. And increasingly well-known author and photojournalist Michael Yon continues to report from the Middle East, primarily through his Web site, MichaelYon-Online.
This year, columnist, journalist, mom and blogger Michelle Malkin took the lead in blogger innovation with a polished video component, Hot Air, producing timely, professional video segments for breaking political news and analysis.
And while notable, the above are a small fraction of the millions of average citizens around the world increasingly analyzing and beginning to develop news on their own. So, what of the Fourth Estate?
The term actually goes back 90 years earlier than when Carlyle invoked Burke. In 1752, Henry Fielding wrote, “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 the community … the Mob.”
Today, better educated, enabled through technology and afforded free time through societal advance, the Mob is becoming less a dingy group of field handsgathered round the public square to hear the news. It is fast becoming more wired in.
It may be five or 20 years away, but the day is coming when a member of the too long overlooked Mob clicks “send” to publish and declares: The Fourth Estate is dead. Long live the Fourth Estate.
What is being spun as a dubious, if not dangerous revolutionary process destined to undermine the credibility of the Fourth Estate, is more factually the evolution of the free and democratic flow of information great thinkers like the authors of the American Constitution always intended. And it’s ultimately more true to the term Fourth Estate.
Just don’t wait for major media to tell you. They may be too busy spinning their next myth.
Dan Riehl blogs at Riehlworldview.com.
