Government has three branches. The press is often called the fourth, an unofficial power with no constitutional title that holds the other three to account. The phrase comes from a sharp observation about who really runs things.
The fourth estate is a nickname for the press, the news media, treated as an informal fourth power in society alongside the official branches of government. It captures the idea that journalism, though it holds no office, wields real power over public life.
The phrase has a pointed origin. The historian Thomas Carlyle attributed it to the British statesman Edmund Burke, who reportedly looked at the reporters' gallery in Parliament and said that there sat a fourth estate more important than all the others combined.
The older estates were the formal powers of the realm. In Europe the three estates were the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners. To call the press a fourth estate was to say that this new force, the people who could speak to the whole nation at once, had become a power in its own right.
Its function is to watch the watchmen. A free press informs the public, exposes corruption, and checks abuses that the formal branches might commit or conceal. In a democracy, the fourth estate is meant to be the citizen's eyes on power.
