(Originally posted 2/22/09)
The Fourth Estate (the press), despite having originally come out of the Third Estate (the people),
has overwhelmingly resigned its agency to the king (the executive) such that the two are all but indistinguishable.
In so doing, the corpse of the Fourth Estate that is mainstream media has given the executive the perfect cover in the form of an apparent critic. By posing only safe and easy questions to those in power, the answers to which of course fall neatly into the narratives the powerful have already outlined, mainstream media gives government an air of transparency and accountability, while in fact knitting the opaque fabric of its shroud.
As a check on governmental authority, the Fourth Estate has mostly been dead a good long while. The media that we take to be the Fourth Estate is actually the knifepoint of the political power that now
inheres in the merged agency of king and critic.
When we swallow the bile of this media without so much as a thought we give the whole system a big "pass," and make accountability an impossibility by refusing to demand it.
Bill Moyers, Jay Rosen, and Glenn Greenwald put meat on these bones in this excellent 23 minute interview.
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