Mark Hampton
According to Thomas Carlyle (1840), Edmund Burke first applied the term “Fourth Estate” to the press gallery in the late eighteenth century, contrasting it with the three Estates of the Realm in France (Clergy, Aristocracy, and Commoners). In a British context, the first three estates might be regarded, instead, as King, Lords, and Commons. In either case, the idea of the Fourth Estate signifies that, whatever the formal constitution, genuine political power resides in the informal role of the press, which in turn derives from the relationship between the press and its readers. In Burke’s usage the press’s ability to mediate between formal politics and the “mob” beyond parliament did not recommend it, but as Britain subsequently democratized, the idea of the press as a “Fourth Estate” would become an important source of legitimization for an increasingly prominent and self-confident institution. Although in the United States the concept of “three Estates” had less relevance, the term “Fourth Estate” – and, more importantly, the underlying concept identified above – has enjoyed similar currency.
To be sure, the term “Fourth Estate” is often employed simply as a synonym for “the press,” without necessarily including all of the connotations identified here. It is used ironically, as in the title of Jeffrey Archer’s (1996) potboiler, to suggest that the institution is not living up to its lofty purpose. The present chapter concentrates on the concept of the press as a de facto, but not official, branch of government in British and American contexts, whether or not the term “Fourth Estate” is actually used. It will briefly examine the relationship between the press and its readers historically envisioned in the concept of the “Fourth Estate,” before considering the challenges posed to this vision by the press’s inclusion within a commercialized mass media and by the press’s relationship to the state. Both factors call into question whether or not the press – and, more recently, broadcast journalism – enjoys the independent perspective required of the “Fourth Estate” ideal.
The idea of the press as a “Fourth Estate” has rested upon rival (but often overlapping) ideals of the relationship between the press and its readers.1 In nineteenth-century Britain, the predominant model, which may be called an “educational” ideal, suggested that the press serves as an agency of public discussion, in which rival ideas and interests compete with each other until, ideally, the “truth” or the “common good” prevail. This vision presumed rationality and open-mindedness on the part of readers and treated the press as a public sphere analogous to Parliament itself. In other words, the same debates about public affairs that took place within Parliament also took place among the wider political nation in the pages of daily newspapers and serious periodicals. Therefore, even if representative government operated at a level of distance from its constituents, the press allowed constituents and representatives to participate in the same conversation, or what might be called a “politics by public discussion.” This idea of the press, which anticipated Jürgen Habermas’s (1991 [1962]) idea of a bourgeois public sphere, is captured in R.A. Scott-James’s 1913 likening the press to a “polis.” That is, although modern democracies did not entail the face-to-face communication of ancient Athens, the press ensured that all citizens could communicate with each other, and with their parliamentary representatives. Simultaneously, at its most optimistic, this model suggested that working class readers could be integrated into the political nation and could participate in a common, unified public sphere. Confidence that the press was doing this job adequately underlay the abolition of the “Taxes on Knowledge” in Britain between 1853 and 1861, taxes on advertising, paper, and newspaper publication that collectively had prevented the emergence of an inexpensive daily press. In addition, it helped to justify the passage of the 1867 Reform Act, which significantly expanded the British electorate. A similar understanding of the press’s informational role in the United States underlay the First Amendment and Congressional legislation throughout the nineteenth century in support of a free media, for example through post office subsidies (McChesney, 2004; Starr, 2004).
The second model, which may be called a “representative” model, focused less on integrating a mass readership into a common public sphere than on actually constituting readers’ involvement in politics. Rather than facilitating a political discussion in which newspaper readers and politicians both addressed important “questions of the day,” according to the “representative” model the press reflected readers’ interests. More specifically, by publicizing corruption, scandal in high places, or the government’s simple inattention to the needs of the people, the press could ensure that a nominally democratic government met its obligations to its constituents. W.T. Stead, a British radical whose editorial positions included the Darlington Northern Echo (1871–80) and the Pall Mall Gazette (1883–90), went so far as to refer to Parliament as the “Chamber of Initiative.” As he wrote, “No measure ever gets itself into shape, as a rule, before being debated many times as a project in the columns of the newspapers” (Stead, 1886, 656). Stead’s argument contains more than a hint of self-justification – he wrote it during a short prison term for kidnapping a young girl who he purchased as part of his campaign against underage prostitution or “white slavery” – but it exemplifies the prevailing understanding of the press’s political role during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Muhlmann (2008) has recently described a similar function, in the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American, British, and French journalism, as a “unifying” journalism based on the model of the journalist as a “witness-ambassador.” For such figures as the French journalist Séverine, exposing the injustice of the Dreyfus Affair, or the American “muckraker” Lincoln Steffens, the role of journalism was to unify a nation’s citizens through exposing the actions of malefactors who threatened the nation.
What both of these models have in common is that the press was to serve as an “indispensable link” between a representative government and its constituents (Boyce, 1978: 21). Whether to promote discussion and “educate” readers, or to “represent” them by publicizing abuses, any concept of the press as a “Fourth Estate” would seem, therefore, to require the accessible presentation of serious information and an independent perspective. For this reason, in the view of many critics (particularly on the Left), the concept of the press as a “Fourth Estate” has been threatened by the growing concentration of media ownership in the twentieth century, and the incorporation of media within diversified corporations that have various non-media interests. At the same time, twentieth-century British and American critics have noted the tendency of journalism to identify too closely with the perspective of the state. Both of these developments have threatened the notion of “independence” that is essential to the function of the press as a “Fourth Estate.” Although the “Fourth Estate” ideal originally referred to newspapers, it has been extended since the early twentieth century to broadcast media and, more recently, to the Internet, so that questions concerning ownership, commercialization, and the role of the state apply to these more recent media as well (Barnett and Gaber, 2001, 1).
Boyce, in a stimulating examination of the “Fourth Estate” concept in Britain, points out that the nineteenth-century articulation of that “myth” rarely considered the financial underpinnings of the press, and that as late as the early twentieth century the elite papers on which the ideal relied – such as the Manchester Guardian, the Daily Chronicle, the Daily News, and the Westminster Gazette – remained heavily dependent on finance by political parties (1978, 28–9).2 Rather than Stead’s “government by journalism,” therefore, the result was “government by politicians, with journalists acting as go-betweens, advisers, and, occasionally, opponents of the practising politicians.” Not only did press finance contribute to this close relationship, but elite journalists themselves welcomed it as a means of gaining greater influence than they would through an adversarial role (Boyce, 1978, 29). Boyce highlights the irony that “press barons” such as Lord Northcliffe, Lord Beaverbrook, and Lord Rothermere, whose papers’ huge circulations and resulting advertising revenues freed them from financial dependence on the politicians, were so fiercely denounced as a threat to an independent “Fourth Estate.” Curran argues, likewise, that the difference between press barons and earlier newspaper owners was that the press barons “sought to use their papers, not as levers of power within the political parties, but as instruments of power against the political parties” (Curran 1997, 49). Indeed, while Stead had boasted of the press’s ability to unseat parliaments, Northcliffe was widely perceived actually to have done so in 1916, having helped to replace Asquith’s wartime Liberal Government with Lloyd George’s Coalition Government (McEwen, 1978). In an example of even greater long-term importance, one of the great American press magnates, William Randolph Hearst, was credited with a large role in helping to engineer the 17th Amendment to the US Constitution (1912), providing for the direct election of Senators (Proctor 1998, 216). Hearst’s campaign, namely the 1906 publication of David Graham Phillips’ “The Treason of the Senate” in Cosmopolitan, centred on charges that numerous Senators were simply the hired guns of special interests, and had accordingly squashed populist reform that had been proposed by the more democratically responsive House of Representatives.
Such episodes would appear to stand as salutary examples of the power of the independent commercial press to perform a credible “watchdog” role. In the popular mythology, such episodes are joined by the New York Times’ publication of The Pentagon Papers (1971), Edward Murrow’s See it Now campaign against Senator McCarthy (1954), and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s exposure of the Watergate break-in and cover-up (1973).3 British media history perhaps lacks such iconic moments, but its tradition of investigative journalism is well-established, including such examples as John Pilger’s campaigning journalism for the Daily Mirror in the 1960s and The Sunday Times’ 1970s campaign against the government on behalf of thalidomide victims.4 According to liberal scholars such examples provide evidence of commercial journalism’s contribution to a democratic public sphere (e.g., McNair, 2000).
Yet if the press barons and corporate media have at times demonstrated a credible financial and political independence of government and have, on occasion, gone so far as to undermine corrupt or anti-democratic government policies, radical critics none the less remain sceptical about a commercial media’s inability to perform a consistent “Fourth Estate” role as either a government “watchdog” or more ambitiously (to return to Stead’s term) a “chamber of initiative.” On the one hand, commercialization has its limits as a basis for journalistic independence; on the other hand, and not unrelated, twentieth century democratic governments have shown themselves quite capable of using commercial media for their own political ends.
In one sense, the term “commercialization” is misleading. Rather, what it entails, in a process normally dated to the 1830s in the United States and the 1850s in Britain, is newspapers’ gradual shift away from financial dependence upon political parties to dependence upon circulation and advertising revenues. Yet whatever term one uses, a press whose finances are based on circulation and advertising revenues has, in practice, experienced several distinct threats to the independence and serious purpose required of a “Fourth Estate” role. First, technological innovations since the mid-nineteenth century have led to increasingly high entry costs, so that concentration of newspaper ownership increased dramatically during the early twentieth century, and ownership of broadcasting media outlets has been fairly tightly concentrated from their beginnings (initially, in large part, on grounds of spectrum scarcity). This concentration has taken different forms in Britain and the United States. In Britain, where mostly London-based papers had evolved into a national press by the early twentieth century, the issue was that a small number of owners controlled papers earning the lion’s share of national circulation. Curran (1997, 78) shows, for example, that by 1947 the three leading corporations had attained circulation shares of 62% and 60%, respectively, for national daily and national Sunday circulation; the figure for total daily and Sunday circulation was somewhat more modest at 42%. By 1961 these respective figures were 89%, 84%, and 65%, though they fell off modestly in subsequent decades. In the United States, by contrast, where most readers remained loyal to local or regional newspapers, the issue was that fewer and fewer towns possessed competing papers, and papers were increasingly part of national chains such as Gannett or Scripps (McChesney, 2004; Hamilton, 2004). Such concentration of ownership has made the notion of a “marketplace of ideas” problematic. To be fair, it is not clear exactly how many newspapers or television news outlets are necessary for a healthy public sphere, but it is none the less clear that the idea that potential new entrants perpetually force existing players to remain responsive to democratic forces is, at best, far-fetched.
Second, and closely related, news outlets are increasingly part of non-media conglomerates, in many cases operating on an international basis. Given that international corporations play an ever-increasing role in making decisions that affect the lives of citizens, it would seem appropriate to expand the Fourth Estate’s watchdog remit to include their activities as well as those of elected officials. Indeed, the extension of the concept to monitoring powerful corporations can be seen in popular culture, for example in the American film The Insider (2000), a dramatization of Lowell Bergman’s 60 Minutes exposé of the tobacco industry. Yet critics caution that it is unrealistic to expect NBC News or ABC News, for example, consistently to report critically on the activities of respective parent companies General Electric and Disney, while McChesney (1999, 53–4) points to examples of NBC and ABC using news programmes to promote (respectively) NBC television ratings and Disney films. Indeed even Bergman’s tobacco story affirms the embattled crusading journalist only through highlighting his difficulty in overcoming the corporate censorship of his own employer, CBS, whose executives worried about the possibility of a lawsuit (Rich, 1999). Moreover, such worries go beyond simply whether individual companies will be reported from an independent and critical perspective. Rather, critics argue, corporate media have a built-in bias toward presenting news in such a way as to create an overall favourable environment for business, not least that of the media companies themselves (e.g., Moyers, 2008).
Third, for a century critics have argued that defining news values according to what would attain the circulation that would attract advertising revenues has led to the “dumbing down” of serious news (Engel, 1996; Sparks, 1991). Sometimes, such criticism smacks of elitist snobbery, and both liberal and populist scholars in different ways defend the compatibility of a democratic public sphere with a definition of news larger than the narrowly “political” (Conboy, 2004; McNair, 2000; Hamilton, 2004). Late nineteenth-century critics in Britain and the USA objected to shorter paragraphs and large headlines in place of long, unbroken columns, as well as to the prevalence of human interest stories that might, in fact, have had a political relevance. Nevertheless, it is difficult to discount Franklin’s characterization of much late twentieth-century journalism, even in the “quality” papers, as “newszak,” light, easily-digested stories that often have little apparent public use; he gives the example (1997, 9) of a 1997 Guardian column asking the question “Could you fancy a man who has had his penis surgically enlarged?” In both countries television news programmes frequently consist of celebrity interviews, while newspapers – especially the tabloids, but the “quality” press as well – give increasing attention to celebrity news as space for investigative and foreign news declines in proportion. Certainly scholars can argue about the extent to which such trends characterize recent journalism, and perhaps an argument can even be made that celebrity or human interest stories are useful ways of framing genuine public issues (Conboy, 2006). In addition, the exposé character of many celebrity stories owes at least a rhetorical debt to the informational and adversarial components of the Fourth Estate ideal – as does the “pseudo-controversy” paradigm implied in the penis enhancement story cited above. Yet it is difficult to dismiss evidence that much journalism has little relevance to a “Fourth Estate” function as it is historically understood.
Fourth, even where newspapers and television networks remain theoretically committed to serious investigative journalism, the relentless drive for profits has increasingly put pressure on the budgets allocated for newsgathering. Between 1969 and 1994, for example, the proportion of British journalists who worked as freelancers skyrocketed, from approximately 10% of the total to somewhere between one-fourth and one-third. Unlike dedicated “beat” journalists, these contract workers, generally paid only upon delivering copy, are not in a position to devote months to an investigative project that might never result in a story (Franklin, 1997). Meanwhile, even for journalists with full-time positions, the pressure to “do more with less” meant that budgets were generally not forthcoming for a patient, careful investigation that might not result in a story (McChesney, 2004, 81).5
Even while the commercial basis of news has proven at best an unreliable basis for the critical independence required of the “Fourth Estate” ideal, media critics have suggested that even journalism’s independence from the state has been exaggerated. In contexts in which national security can plausibly be invoked, both the US and British states have legal mechanisms for restraining the publication of sensitive news. In the case of Britain, the Official Secrets Act and the Defence of the Realm Act provide legal cover for punishing journalists whose revelations go beyond the permissible, and the former was fairly effective until the 1980s (Seymour-Ure, 1996, 252–7). In the United States, a Supreme Court ruling shortly after World War I established the standard that First Amendment freedoms of the press could be restricted in the interests of national security only in the case of a “clear and present danger” (Siebert et al, 1963, 58–9). Despite this ruling, however, in particularly contentious periods the American state has remained willing to use a heavy hand. For example, so long as criticism of the Vietnam War remained the province of a small-circulation dissident press, readers of anti-war papers such as the National Guardian could be the victims of “intimidating phone calls and visits from FBI agents, resulting in hundreds of canceled subscriptions” (Streitmatter, 2001, 197).6 Similarly, Milo Radulovich, the McCarthy victim discharged from the Air Force in 1953 as a security risk before being acquitted through the efforts of Murrow’s See it Now, was targeted largely because his father and sister subscribed to a Serbian newspaper that was thought to support a Communist party. Although McCarthy’s disgrace at the hands of Murrow is one of the signature moments within Fourth Estate discourse, the episode also reminds us that on occasion the state has used its power to intimidate readers of non-mainstream papers.
Even short of such drastic measures, both states and their variously governing parties have developed sophisticated apparatuses for getting their perspectives into independent news media, a practice that is sometimes called “spin.” Moore (2006) locates the “origins of modern spin” in Britain in the efforts of the 1945–51 Labour government to combat the hostility of the predominantly conservative press to Labour’s nationalizing and welfare programs.7 Observers have argued that these efforts only intensified and grew more sophisticated in the 1980s and later, and built their effectiveness on an understanding of news cycles. For example, as Barnett and Gaber (2001, 7) argue, “It is now established practice to release relatively complex but important information close to reporters’ deadlines. This ensures that journalists are increasingly dependent on sources not just for the information itself but for the interpretation – the ‘spin’ ”. This practice relies on an understanding of the speededup working conditions journalists face as a result of ever more stringent budget cuts (Franklin, 1997), as well as professional journalism’s bias toward “official” sources and, in the US, the “on the one hand … on the other” style of “objectivity” (Schudson, 1978).8 As McChesney (2004, 69) says of American journalists’ dealings with politicians, journalists “discover that they cannot antagonize their sources or they might get cut off from all information.” Such a deprivation of access would, of course, severely hamper a journalist’s effectiveness, and by extension his or her career prospects. During the early stages of the 2003 Iraq War, the American government introduced the concept of “embedded” soldiers in an effort to manage journalistic access and thus ensure that the government’s perspective predominated in media coverage (Tumber and Palmer, 2004). Herman and Chomsky (1988) have gone so far as to argue that in the United States the nexus between state interest and corporate media’s economic incentives has produced a consistent propaganda model – a far cry from the Fourth Estate’s putative critical and adversarial role.
Finally, even where corporate policy or professional survival do not demand subservience to the desired policies of the state, journalists tend to operate within a national frame, especially within times of crisis (Jamieson and Waldman, 2003, 131). Famous counter-examples such as the BBC’s treating British and Argentine official statements as moral equivalents during the Falklands War stand out for their rarity, particularly in American journalism. According to American media scholars Jamieson and Waldman (2003, 14), although people often take for granted that the press plays an “adversarial role to those in power and is quick to unmask, debunk, and challenge,” the press does so only very selectively. Particularly, in cases in which reporters assume that the nation “supports the person telling the story … and opposing narratives are not being offered by competing players”, the adversarial role is significantly reduced. Hallin (1989) offers a similar explanation of the American media’s conduct during the Vietnam War, pointing out that, so long as the public (and especially the elites) remained broadly united in support of the war, mainstream media were fairly uncritical in their coverage; critical coverage followed, rather than led, the shift in public opinion. From a “Fourth Estate” perspective, this would seem to be precisely backwards. Similarly, although critical American media coverage of the Iraq War was common by 2006, when support for the war was being built in late 2002 and 2003 neither newspapers nor television news questioned key claims of the Bush administration. Not even the New York Times, widely regarded as the “paper of record,” provided basic information about available evidence that Iraq had suspended its weapons programmes or that, according to international agreements to which the United States was a party, even the confirmation of a weapons programme would not have warranted a unilateral invasion (Friel and Falk, 2004).
The criticisms outlined above suggest that mainstream journalism has significant practical limitations as a Fourth Estate. It may be that “alternative” or “dissident” journalism is the most promising venue for a thoroughgoing “Fourth Estate” media (Atton, 2001; Streitmatter, 2001), and defenders of this position can point to examples of perspectives in alternative media that eventually made their way to mainstream media. Yet it is difficult to imagine that many opponents of the Vietnam War (for example) would take comfort from the fact that the early 1960s critique made its way into mainstream American newspaper and television coverage only after several more years of war. The Internet is similarly heralded by many as a potentially democratic “watchdog” that promises to break the hold of dominant corporations over the circulation of news; but even if the Internet is capable of decentralizing the distribution of news and opinion, which is no foregone conclusion, given that corporations control the search engines and portals (McChesney, 1999), it will not solve the problem of the costs of gathering news, particularly of investigative journalism (Hamilton, 2004).
Yet if media that are organized along commercial lines fail to provide a consistent critique of government and corporate institutions, we should perhaps not be surprised. The great contribution of the “Fourth Estate” ideal may well be that it provides a vision to which journalists often aspire, and an obligation that is met frequently enough to force governments and corporations at least to consider the public response to their actions.9
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1 This paragraph and the subsequent one draw liberally on Hampton, 2004, which discusses the “educational” and “representative” ideals in a British context. Campbell, 2006, provides an excellent, historically focused account of the clash between rival theories of journalism in late nineteenth century United States. In addition, for eloquent and erudite discussions of similar themes across national boundaries and centuries see Keane, 1991, 1–50 and Siebert et al., 1963, 39–71.
2 See also the excellent discussions in Conboy, 2004, 109–27; Petley, 2004.
3 For stimulating discussions of the popular image of journalism, see Erlich, 2006; Franklin, 1997, 25–32.
4 I am grateful to Tom O’Malley for his advice on this theme. In addition to these examples from a commercial press, Britain possesses an investigative tradition of public service broadcasting, notable examples including ITV’s World in Action and BBC’s Panorama.
5 This pressure to cut costs in order to deliver greater shareholder profits, in a contemporary American context, is one of the major plot-lines of the HBO TV programme The Wire, series 5.
6 Streitmatter (2001, 196) also points out that the National Guardian struggled financially because “few businesses were willing to buy advertisements in an anti-war newspaper,” illustrating again the hazards of relying on the market to support a critical and independent press.
7 Yet if the extent of government efforts to shape media coverage has increased since World War II, they have a rich history. See, for example, Brown, 2009, for Lord Palmerston’s ability to shape newspaper coverage in the 1850s.
8 Professional journalism’s reliance on official sources is illustrated by the fact that even such celebrated examples of “Fourth Estate” journalism as the publication of the Pentagon Papers and the exposure of the Watergate break-in and cover-up relied on leaks from government officials at odds with their agencies or departments. The “adversarial” journalism in each case thus constituted, from one perspective, not so much journalists taking on the government as a dissenting position in the government employing the media against the dominant position.
9 See, for example, Hampton, 2009.