Fourth Estate

The equivalent term "fourth power" is somewhat uncommon in English, but it is used in many European languages, including German (Vierte Gewalt), Italian (quarto potere), Spanish (Cuarto poder), French (Quatrième pouvoir), Swedish (tredje statsmakten [Third Estate]), Polish (Czwarta Władza), and Russian (четвёртая власть) to refer to a government's separation of powers into legislative, executive, and judicial branches.

The expression has also been applied to lawyers, to the British Queen Consort (acting as a free agent independent of her husband), and to the proletariat.

But, generally, the term "Fourth Estate" refers to the press and media, emphasizing its role in monitoring and influencing the other branches of government and society.

[2][3][4] Oxford English Dictionary attributes, ("without confirmation") the origin of the term to Edmund Burke, who may have used it in a British parliamentary debate of 19–20 February 1771, on the opening up of press reporting of the House of Commons of Great Britain.

[11] Carlyle, however, may have mistaken his attribution: Thomas Macknight, writing in 1858, observes that Burke was merely a teller at the "illustrious nativity of the Fourth Estate".

[7] If Burke is excluded, other candidates for coining the term are Henry Brougham speaking in Parliament in 1823 or 1824[12] and Thomas Macaulay in an essay of 1828 reviewing Hallam's Constitutional History: "The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.

When Benkler was asked to testify in the United States vs. PFC Bradley E. Manning trial, in his statement to the morning 10 July 2013 session of the trial he described the Networked Fourth Estate as the set of practices, organizing models, and technologies that are associated with the free press and provide a public check on the branches of government.

[19]: 99–100 In 1580 Michel de Montaigne proposed that governments should hold in check a fourth estate of lawyers selling justice to the rich and denying it to rightful litigants who do not bribe their way to a verdict:

French: quatriesme estat (old orthography), quatrième état (modern)] of Lawyers, breathsellers and pettifoggers [...].Michel de Montaigne, in the translation by John Florio, 1603.

[24]This sense has prevailed in other countries: In Italy, for example, striking workers in 1890s Turin were depicted as Il quarto stato—The Fourth Estate—in a painting by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo.

[26] In response to violence against a textile worker demonstration in Fourmies, France on May Day 1891, Georges Clemenceau said in a speech to the Chamber of Deputies:Take care!

One must pay attention to the dead...I tell you that the primary fact of politics today is the inevitable revolution which is preparing...The Fourth Estate is rising and reaching for the conquest of power.

[29][30] In his novel The Fourth Estate, Jeffrey Archer wrote: "In May 1789, Louis XVI summoned to Versailles a full meeting of the 'Estates General'.