Fourth Estate

Ian Hargreaves' Journalism: Truth or Dare looks at journalism today, but what do quotations from earlier centuries say about the press?

"I make it a rule never to look into a newspaper," said a character in Sheridan's The Critic (1779), and in Northanger Abbey (1818), Jane Austen was alert to possible dangers: "A country like this, where...every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open."

(What 'news' consists of has itself been debated. The American journalist John B. Bogart's careful explanation "When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news," has indeed provided the language with a lasting image: "man-bites-dog" is now used to designate a situation in which the usual sufferer is the aggressor. Ezra Pound, on the other hand, thought that "Literature is news that stays news.")

The power of the press has long been recognized: in 1843 Lord Macaulay wrote that "The gallery [in the House of Commons] in which the reporters sit has since become a fourth estate of the realm." Twenty years later Walter Bagehot commented "The Times has made many ministries," an acknowledgement of an iconic paper which did not foresee the idiosyncratic use recommended by the explorer Mary Kingsley: "When well wetted and beaten into a pulp and then boiled gently in a pipkin, there is simply nothing equal to The Times for stopping cracks or holes in one's canoe."

"The power of the press is very great, but not so great as the power of suppress" said the press baron Lord Northcliffe, and a number of reservations have been expressed. Mark Twain thought that, "There are laws to protect the freedom of the press's speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press." The American President Theodore Roosevelt believed that, "The men with the muck-rakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck." A warning from the Hungarian-born American newspaper proprietor and editor Joseph Pulitzer is inscribed on the gateway to the Columbia School of Journalism in New York: "A cynical, mercenary, demagogic, corrupt press will produce in time a people as base as itself."

It is not difficult to find adverse comment ("The press is ferocious. It forgives nothing" –Diana, Princess of Wales), but the positive side is there as well. "A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself," said Arthur Miller in 1961. And the American journalist Amy Goodman, accepting an award from Columbia University for her coverage of the 1991 massacre in East Timor, gave a succinct recommendation for journalistic practice: "Go to where the silence is and say something."

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