The Fourth Estate is the fourth pillar of American Democracy

Fourth Estate, Part I: Well, how did we get here?

The enemy of the people.

It isn’t just President Donald J. Trump who fears and loathes the press. A large chunk of the voting public has discounted the so-called mainstream media to the point of presuming its entire output is partisan propaganda. Trump’s epithets—“fake news,” “the enemy of the people,” and other hand-grenades are intended to undermine public trust in the Fourth Estate. Why? Let’s just say that it serves his purposes to do that. Yet, confidence in the news had already reached an all-time low before Trump’s 2015 golden escalator ride.  

Popular wisdom at both political extremes considers mainstream media biased, socially irresponsible, culturally irrelevant, and economically stagnant—certainly out of touch and annoying. Editorial pundits in the center who point out the craven, self-serving nature of politicians’ attacks on the press are just liable to catch shrapnel themselves, without landing any punches, or making a difference.

But forget pundits, forget Trump and his base, forget the high-minded practitioners of reason, neutrality, and civility. Consider the role of the Fourth Estate on its own terms: How did the news industry as we know it begin, and what is its role in the future of American democracy?

As Newsjunkie finds its editorial footing and builds its database of every important actor in English-language journalism, we would like to consider the accepted narrative first and foremost. Like any good reporting house, that perspective should be formed by, well, reporting. Our reporting on the role of the news industry in the US reveals a picture rooted in community interest and capitalist motivations, over truth and “fake news,” and yet murky in the general understanding of news’ history and function.

To untangle the factors that led the press to its state of disarray will require a series of articles on the individual topics raised in this overview. So as this series begins, we will establish two things: what the press is and the problems the press has faced. We will explore the historic role of the press in American culture, how it has played a role in American government, and how it has not so much failed as radically redefined its mandate over the last two decades. Because in reality, as the historian of journalism David Paul Nord wrote, “American journalism has never had a golden age.”

America and the News grew up together

Start at the beginning. Historians consider a pamphlet published in Boston on September 25, 1690 called Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick to be the first newspaper published in America. In it, editor Benjamin Harris invoked a simple thesis for the enterprise:

“Something may be done toward the Curing, or at least the Charming of that Spirit of Lying, which prevails amongst us, wherefore nothing shall be entered, but what we have reason to believe is true, repairing to the best fountains for our Information.”

Reading past the anachronistic language, the Fourth Estate finds its foundational form as a cultural force in America, an enterprise built on metaphors like charming, curing, and repairing. The newspaper originated as a social megaphone to measure, test, and correct public opinion according to the joint interests of democratic consensus and rational expertise.

Tragically and poetically, the paper was banned by the British colonial government four days later. It took 14 years to publish another newspaper in the colonies.

Still, the Founding Fathers understood the role of a free press. The First Amendment—beloved, quoted, twisted—enshrines that right and the broader right to free speech before nearly anything else. With that protection, the Constitution guaranteed a means of discourse outside of the upper crust’s salons. Though the founders of the country famously feared mob rule in the same breath as their belief in democracy, they also recognized the need for information to be transmitted and debated for a healthy society. Nothing embodies this better than the wild success of the pseudo-journalistic Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. 

In this sense, the news industry has always been an implied fourth pillar in the traditional check and balance system of American democracy. While the executive, legislative, and judicial branches duke out and resolve the specifics of federal law, the press has traditionally been the voice of the day-to-day concerns of the people, the bellwether of public opinion beyond the decisiveness of an election, a medium to express discontent and new ideas. It is the communication link that binds democratic institutions and the people they represent.

Newspapers achieved mass popularization in the 1800s with the advent of party-centric papers and the penny press. With so many readers, institutional journalism filled in the gaps between elections, providing a kind of outline for politically acceptable behavior. Politicians could do whatever they wanted “legally” so long as they didn’t start coloring outside the socially acceptable lines reinforced by the journalists.

This concept of social pressure opens up a window to the “fake news” of generations past. In their early years, American newspapers were not yet associated with a standard of objectivity. Each paper was generally understood to belong to a particular political faction. Factual reporting was important, but those facts were usually presented within the framework of a political position or moral values. This was typified by early papers such as the National Intelligencer, a Washington, D.C. newspaper founded in October 1800 which explicitly supported Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party.

Newspapers like the Intelligencer exploded across the country before there was a national paper of record aiming for objectivity. In 1800 there were only 200 newspapers, but by 1860 there were more than 3,000. In his famous survey of the country during this period, French intellectual Alexis De Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America that “there is scarcely a hamlet which has not its own newspaper.”

Reporting and Discourse

This cultural environment explains the creation of the press’ two core products, even today: reporting and discourse. When American communities were still spreading across the continent—geographically and culturally—the latter product, the production of discourse, was paramount. How you talk about the world defines you, especially in pluralistic society like the United States. Absent other public forums of debate, newspapers served as the defining consciousness of their readership. What it meant to be part of a town or a political party or a ethnic group was contained within the pages of that community’s newspaper. 

However, this period of rapid American expansion soon morphed and ossified. The contiguous continental US reached its territorial peak with the Gadsden Purchase of 1854 and soon after erupted into the Civil War, where the press played an important wartime role. The striking, violent accounts of battles like Wilson’s Creek woke up the public to the reality war. Magazines like Harper’s Weekly became popular for their illustrations of battles, vividly conveying the violence and drama of a shattered nation.

Once the war ended and steam- engines of progress propelled the nation into modernity, two important styles emerged which would come to dominate our contemporary conception of journalism: the Yellow Press and the Muckrakers.

The Yellow Press can be considered an early example of mass media, where competition for profits  drove publishers like William Randolph Hearst and Josef Pulitzer to exert unprecedented influence over public discourse. Hearst and Josef Pulitzer spun sensational stories and eye-catching comics into massive of sales. These papers created identities broader than those associated with a town or neighborhood, as parties and national politics became more popularly accessible and connected to a consumer identity. It accelerated the production of the discourse product, trading in headlines that deliberately distorted facts and narratives to fit the agenda of the publishers.

Counterweight to the sensationalism was the work of the Muckrakers, the group of foundational investigative journalists that included Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, and Lincoln Steffens. Though sometimes sensational (without being sensationalistic) the Muckrakers attempted to uncover the capital-T Truth about corruption in the networks of monopolies, corporate power, and influence. Their work revolutionized journalism’s reporting product.

Although an ideal of journalistic objectivity had circulated since the mid-1800s, even the Muckraker’s reporting had yet to aim for our modern understanding of the notion—our conception of objectivity as political neutrality. In stories exposing Standard Oil or the Chicago stockyards, Muckrakers wrote with an explicit progressive agenda. Some, like Upton Sinclair, wrote with revolutionary aims. They were largely “objective” in their reporting of the facts, but they did not adopt the politically flat tone expected of major newspapers today. They included open calls to regulate and reform in their work and did not separate facts from values.

The influence of Muckrakers peaked during the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt provides a model as the first president to utilize the press with a modern sensibility. Famous for coining and utilizing the Bully Pulpit, Roosevelt was the first president to capitalize on the press as a tool to manipulate public opinion. He found that although, as De Tocqueville wrote, “the press cannot create human passions by its own power,” it can exacerbate existing ones. Roosevelt understood the power of popular pressure in a democratic system, so he routinely consulted with influential Muckrakers about policy issues, leveraging their subject area expertise to win popular sentiment. This resulted in a range of reformist progressive legislation which he managed to force through Congress over the heads of conservative, institutional Republican leaders.

Since inviting reporters into his office during his afternoon shave, it became standard for journalists to have access to the federal government and politicians.

The Medium is the Message

Developments from the Gilded Age into the modern press era continued after the 1920s, but industry trends were more the product of technology advances than journalistic innovation. Reporting and discourse adapted to new mediums like telephones, radio, and eventually television, bringing more information to more people, more quickly. It was the birth of true mass communication, with more people were creating, receiving, and sharing information than ever before, a process which has continued exponentially up to today.

The power of mass communication quickly overwhelmed the capabilities of journalists to completely inform the public. Though it is arguable whether it was ever possible to be “totally” informed of the events in a community or a country, many enfranchised Americans in the nineteenth century believed themselves to be basically informed and capable of participating in political life. This is captured in De Toqueville’s account.

“The world about which each man is supposed to have opinions has become so complicated as to defy his powers of understanding."

However, with the turn of the century and the rise of true mass communication, it became clear to the cutting edge practitioners of journalism that the world was too big, too fragmented, and too fast to deliver a quality version of the reporting product on the most important subjects. Following his experience as a journalist and propagandist in World War I, twentieth century intellectual powerhouse Walter Lippman put it simply: “The world about which each man is supposed to have opinions has become so complicated as to defy his powers of understanding."

A case study of this phenomena can be seen in the newsreel, the short documentaries before feature films popular during the first half of the twentieth century. These predecessors to TV news presented brief reports, sometimes less than a minute long, that didn’t aim for particular depth, context, or even objective presentation. They delivered lowest common denominator information as entertainment, framing current events according to the popular sentiments or governmental aims of the moment. Reports from World War II for example featured aggressive pro-American propaganda, to help ensure public sentiment stayed in support of the war effort.

These technological advancements continued alongside political polarization, which led to the desire for our modern conception of objectivity. Economic incentives pushed publishers to flatten the idealistic tone or political persuasions of the reporting product in order to reach more consumers, offending fewer and selling to more. Despite the overwhelming trough of information, the mainstream cultural clarity of American interests in the Cold War and the limited array of news sources helped temporarily buck mass communication’s obfuscating effects.

With Watergate, for example, the “objective” press reached its cultural high-water mark. With a story so scandalous, reported with such undeniable clarity, the public was able to turn on a dime against the popularly elected president, harkening back to journalism’s original mandate as a check on the democratic system. However, alongside the representative trust in TV anchors like Walter Cronkite, this was largely an exception to the modern trend of the news industry.

The New News

History shows that the press has always been messy. It has always been partisan, subjective, and limited. So what’s different now? Why does popular wisdom consider the press “in crisis”?

In part, this is because the discourse function of journalism has become almost entirely irrelevant. Even with mass communication, people turned to the news to learn how they could or should think about current events. But with the advent of social media, there became less need to open the pages of a newspaper to get an opinion. It’s now easier, more fun, and more accessible to get that information from Twitter.

So the press lost its dominance over the discourse product. That left it with reporting. But technology companies also disrupted that market. When readers or watchers of years past turned to their preferred outlet, they would build trust with simple objectivity, such as the weather forecast or sports scores. When those became more immediately accessible from an app, there was no need to build that foundational relationship with a newspaper, meaning they were less likely to turn to journalists for blockbuster Watergate-style stories later. 

“Most people really just want the information they need to move on with their lives,” said Benjamin Toff, an author of Avoiding the News and the Director of the Minnesota Journalism Center at the University of Minnesota. “The business of journalism isn’t just about selling this commodity of news. It’s more like you’re running a restaurant. It’s about the cumulative effect and the relationship you’re building.”

As the relationship between consumer and outlet weakened, politicians also began to leverage outlets’ self-determined need to be perfectly unbiased. The average person, it turns out, didn’t really want objectivity, at least not in the journalistic sense. The average news consumer wanted what they saw to be reasonable information that they found “important.” That translated to a good enough reporting product that fit within their broader network of discourse, similar to the old local newspapers’ role in creating a community. What was considered “important”, however, varied wildly from person to person, leading to the politically fragmented world of mainstream TV, for example, like Fox News and MSNBC.

Faced with this struggle to maintain relevance with discourse or reporting, we find the news industry at a crossroads. Dozens of solutions have been proposed to bring back a misremembered gold standard of American journalism—a nebulous black-and-white haze of slicked newscasters and bold headlines. Not minding the fact that standard was not objectively informing the population even then, some of those movements have gained traction: fact checking, nonprofit news, aggregators, hyperlocal papers, Substack newsletters, TikTok news influencers. However, those mostly place news as "content" to a technologically-enabled entertainment platform.

“For the industry to be so dependent on these digital intermediaries as the primary conduit to which they’re reaching the public, this is not sustainable,” added Toff. All those solutions assume that news is still a lesser product, something consumed by leaving a primary platform like Twitter. This problem is only likely to accelerate with AI, which can make certain content much more appealing for the average consumer, such as text-to-speech podcasts or visualizations. The exponential growth of the information economy will only continue to expand.

But combating public preference for other mediums would be fighting human nature. The very idea that there is a need to go back to an old form of better, more refined, more objective journalism is out of touch with our habits as a species. 

Still, “if we want serious politicians, we need a serious media,” said Andrew Keen, an author, entrepreneur, media commentator, and outspoken critic of technology companies. “And if we want a serious media, we need a serious citizenry. There is a serious media for a small proportion of people, but the vast majority of Americans just aren’t serious. They don’t view politics as a serious thing. It’s just reality television.”

As Lippman suggested, there is no way for the average person to possibly receive and synthesize enough information today to have a complete, informed view of the world. That ideal hasn’t existed for at least a century. In reality, old journalism worked very much like today’s journalism, rife with opinions, screeds, lies, and falsehoods, too obsessed with the next most important story to understand the last one. A real solution is not to recapture ghostly glories but to reassess the needs of the average news consumer within the information economy. “At a certain point, the system’s going to break,” added Keen. “This is not an infinitely elastic system that can put up with such absurdity, such irresponsibility.”

Much ado about Truth

At Newsjunkie, we believe the solution has to do with “lensing.” There is almost no way someone can be knowledgeable about everything going on in the news. To keep up with current events would mean knowing the meter-by-meter frontline advances of the Russian army in the Kursk region, the Vegas odds of the frontrunning actress nominations at next year’s Oscars, and the shenanigans of real estate speculators in Miami Beach, all in the same afternoon. A solid grasp of the interests of every important story is simply impossible.

Instead, a better grasp of the relationship between those stories and how they’re being told is more productive, especially considering the core products of journalism are still the same. We understand reporting and discourse in isolation, but being able to zoom in, zoom out, pan left, pan right on who is telling the story, how they are telling it, who is paying for it, and why they are telling it may lead to better information than the core products themselves. Trustworthy reporting from news organizations is still essential for an informed public–but viewers' awareness of the bigger picture is equally consequential. “For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy,” wrote Lippman, “the book out of which a people determines its conduct.”

Fourth Estate, Part II: How Media replaced the Press will be published in September 2025.