Fourth Estate is Dead, Long Live the Fifth

Over 100 news organizations have signed on to running anti-Trump editorials this week as a counterattack to Trump’s criticism of the press.  If their goal is to try to convince the American people that the mainstream news media (MSM) is an independent and reliable source of information then they have already failed.  The only thing they will have achieved is to make the people who already hold the view that Trump is Satan to agree with them even more and to provide those who no longer trust the MSM even more evidence of collusion and coordination among the media corporations to target Trump.

There is a new sheriff in town by the name of the Fifth Estate.  The term is used to describe individual bloggers and social media that are not controlled by political parties or corporations (though they are trying to do so as you read this).  With social media and personal blogs, individual citizens can challenge the spin and fake news produced by the MSM outlets.  MSM isn’t going to give up their stranglehold on political discourse anytime soon however.  Twitter and Facebook are currently implementing ways to block political speech that doesn’t toe the left-leaning DNC political agenda.  Whether or not they will be successful remains to be seen.

For generations of Americans, the so-called Fourth Estate was considered a critical part of the fabric of our society.  That is because our system of government being a libertarian and free Republic depends upon a voting population that was well informed on the important issues of the day.  The Fourth estate (to include print, radio, television, and online news organizations) was to provide an independent voice within the political discourse as it well known even back in the colonial days that politicians lie or spin arguments for their own political gains.  However, in modern times the Fourth estate no longer can be relied upon to be a source of impartial and independent information (some say it was never all that reliable or independent to begin with).  The advent of the internet has allowed ordinary citizens and bloggers to become a Fifth Estate and provide much needed commentary and challenge to the manufactured viewpoints of the mainstream media.  Even politicians are now able to directly respond to media spin and communicate their messages directly to the people without relying upon the media filter and hoping their message gets through.

The problem with MSM which includes all the traditional channels of news in print, radio, and television started in the 1970s.  Up until then, it was not unusual to have multiple newspapers within the same town competing with each other for readership.  Because of this diversity and competition, the MSM had an effective built-in mechanism to check itself when one media organization goes to far with fake news or spin.  False news stories run the risk of being publicly outed by competitors.  However, during the 70’s news organizations began a wave of consolidations and competition started to disappear.  In cities and towns across America, news readership also started dropping as television news replaced the newspaper as the primary source for news.  Today, almost all hometown newspapers have disappeared or have been bought out by a handful of national media corporations.

In another development news services began to use the same external sources for their stories which is much cheaper and easier than sending their own reporters to maybe get some further insight into a story.  The homogeneity of viewpoints presented as news would not have been as much of a problem had the MSM focused on simply providing facts and impartial analysis.  However, modern MSM news has facts and pure analysis take a backseat to entertainment and the capture of eyeballs by appealing to certain constituents.  The evidence of this is clear when you see that when the same wrong facts and bad analysis get repeated over and over again across multiple news channels.

Around the year 2000, the MSM was shocked by the appearance of bloggers on the internet who accurately point out embarrassing facts when the MSM gets it wrong.  I personally recall multiple news stories challenging the bloggers as dangerous loose cannons and doing investigations into their personal lives and histories in an apparent attempt to silence criticism of the media.  Questionable stories were run about how individual bloggers represent a threat to society as they do not have the legitimacy of traditional media.

During the last several elections for POTUS, we saw how the media was skewed toward the left and the Democratic party.  Graduates of journalism school are now taught that their job is to influence change not necessarily to inform.  Given that graduates of journalism school tend to hold a leaning in their political beliefs, this is a worrying trend.  The Fourth Estate is no longer an independent and reliable commentator on political events but has become an active political participant in such.  If the MSM has outwardly given up even trying to appear impartial, who will be the voice of reason and provide perspective on our political process?  The Fifth Estate, that’s who.

Examples of media bias include:

• Clear bias on the part of news media towards running favorable stories about one party or candidate and negative stories about the other (this has been statistically proven by the pro/con ratio of news stories and editorial content).
• Outright endorsements of one political candidate/party over another (endorsing either side) or no outright endorsement but a clear slant towards one political party thereby making the press no longer a valid independent voice to be trusted.
• News talk shows with predominantly left-leaning political hosts who constantly attacks the other side and spouts personal opinion with no attempt given to present valid opposing arguments.
• Overwhelmingly intertwined personal and business relationships between the leadership of the political parties and members of the MSM corporations.

Donna Brazile was hired by CNN as a political analyst despite her history of being the political strategist for multiple candidates of the DNC.  During the Hillary/Trump debates, she knowingly passed the secret debate questions directly to Hillary in order to giver her an edge.  She was discovered and then she was fired after it became public.  Imagine the uproar this would have caused had Donna been working for the GOP.  How much coverage would the MSM have given had it turned out that Donald Trump had rigged the GOP primaries in his favor?  The silence over this incident was deafening.

It remains to be seen how effective the left will be in silencing dissent against their agenda on social media now that the Fifth Estate genie has been let loose.