Any with a voice to speak is a member of their government.” -Cicero
If you flip to the BBC, you can still find thriving radio programming: the like which has not existed in the US since TV first hit the airwaves. Taxpayer-supported media of Britain means that older forms of media – including newspapers – will continue to be supported. But with no such system in place in the U.S., what does the future hold for our Fourth Estate?
The Fifth Estate has always been clearly figured in the British collective conscious. Edmund Burke, who coined the term, was a British politician.
This historical recognition, in England, of the press as a branch of the government led to the British Broadcasting Network, a nationalized media system.
In England, citizens support the BBC with a tax, and so the media is beholden to the taxpayers. American media is beholden not to the people, but to advertisers.
No doubt these taxpayers will continue to support England’s newspapers, as they supported the radio. Meanwhile in the U.S., while we had Burke’s quote, we also had advertisers paying the bills, and no one seemed inclined to nationalize the media system in the United States until it was on the verge of collapse.
We lacked the British conscious of this topic. The discussion of the fourth estate in Britain is so complex and vibrant it makes the writhings of our press look like children’s play. Is a similiar situation how the BBC started?
We could place the blame on our own media for not standing up to this system they griped under, but it seems unfair given their impending fate. Does the discussion include freedom of the press as the root of their “fiscal” independence? Perhaps the media feared a propaganda state, or lacked the momentum to create a nationwide movement of the press.Nonetheless, the American press did have an opportunity to move the nation away from advertising-funded media.
Having failed/by this fluke, the unique opportunity is created to have journalist citizenry in the United States, to have – in effect – a fourth estate. Actually, Steven D. Cooper calls bloggers the fifth estate. We’ll see if the fourth line of defense hold. Either way, if citizens of the world take to the streets with their camera phones and see it as their duty to report on local news, it would be a triumph for the press. We could be looking at an evolutionary phase in the media.
Originally posted 2007-12-05 22:31:42. Republished by Old Post Promoter
