Long since most people have forgotten – if they ever knew – what the first, second and third estates were, there is general understanding that the Fourth Estate is another name for the news media. By a curious process of hype, self-promotion, definitional flexibility and being a good idea, the Fourth Estate has survived.

Just.

The ideal of the news media successfully fulfilling a political role that transcends its commercial obligations has been seriously battered. Its power, commercial ambitions and ethical weakness have undermined its institutional standing. There is now a widespread, and reasonable, doubt that the contemporary news media can any longer adequately fulfil the historic role the press created for itself several hundred years ago. Then it created itself as an institution of political life designed to act on behalf of the people and report on and give voice to those in positions of political, corporate, economic and social power. In the intervening decades the news media has itself become a source of real and significant power and influence, an industry prepared to exercise and pursue self-interested commercial, political and cultural agendas.

The press was the bastard estate of the eighteenth century. At a time of limited suffrage, but growing literacy, the press became a crucial political institution, intimately connected to the concerns and preoccupations of its readers. By pursuing an institutional ambition the press created itself as more than another business. It created the wont which it supplied. Innovation and willingness to pursue technological developments later enabled the press to grow and diversify to the point where newspapers are now a small part of the news media.