the Fourth Estate

the Fourth Estate

The people and organizations that report the news, or news journalism as a whole, regarded as having palpable but unofficial political influence. One must never forget the sway held by members of the Fourth Estate—if we want public support, then we need the press on our side.
See also: estate, fourth
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

the fourth estate

the press; the profession of journalism.
The three traditional Estates of the Realm (the Crown, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons) are now viewed as having been joined by the press, which is regarded as having equal power. As early as 1843 Lord Macaulay stated: ‘The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm’.
See also: estate, fourth
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary
See also:
  • estate
  • get around
  • get round
  • get round (someone)
  • get round (something)
  • word gets around
  • more at 11
  • be good news
  • break a story
  • break the/a story
References in periodicals archive
The fourth estate network optimization effort is expected to result in a cost avoidance for the department, which means money can be used for efforts supporting increased lethality.
The recent radical decision of the Securities and Exchange Commission against Rappler canceling its registration to continue operating as an online media entity without due process is a bad omen to the independence and objectivity of the press as the Fourth Estate. It proves the present dispensation is dead serious in maiming and killing dissent at all costs.
The fourth estate, the press, the disciples of Voltaire, had replaced the clergy it had dethroned as the new arbiters of morality and rectitude.
The fourth estate has been giving voice to the third for about a quarter of a millennium, "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable," as the humorist Finley Peter Dunne put it.
Burns, a former radio journalist and now an associate professor of media studies at Quinnipiac University, argues in her book First Ladies and the Fourth Estate that press coverage of Carter, Nixon, and other presidential spouses put them in a difficult position.
It might seem at face value that the most powerful institution in Britain is, indeed, the Fourth Estate. Maybe it was always like this.
Once the President takes over that job, the fourth estate has lost its function.
Is it a place where the media acts as the fourth estate, or are they are more concerned about their next appearance before the CRTC?
Jim's final line to the gentlemen of the Fourth Estate was: 'I don't want to read me slaughtering the ref in tomorrow's papers.'
Somewhere between Watergate and "embedding" with the military, the notion of the fourth estate was chucked.
In the worst case scenario, this reduces reporting to a transcription of official pronouncements, transforming the Fourth Estate from a public watchdog over officialdom into a transmission belt for the official version of reality.
Maybe this inertia is due to the timidity of many elected Democratic officials--not to mention the timidity, even the deliberate ignorance, of many of Green's fellow members of the Fourth Estate. JOE MARTIN Seattle, Wash.
They surrender many of the necessary tools for questioning the authority of the armed forces, and render nearly useless the check and the balance of the Fourth Estate on a major power of government.
Sadly, the slap-headed goalkeeper is irritated by the Fourth Estate. "The English press?
This is the beginning of tyranny, and from the Fourth Estate yet!