Don’t Be a Slave to the Fourte Estate 

By Michael Reddy

The Press, the so-called fourth estate, is enormously influential in today’s world, increasingly in the East as much as the West, potentially more influential than government. And certainly it has shown itself capable over the last several decades of causing every bit as much damage as the banks. Anyone who has read the historian Richard Davenport-Hines recent tome “ An English Affair ” on the antics of the press during the sixties and seventies can only be amazed and appalled at the blatant malice of some of the press barons of that era. They will also see a reflection of the Profumo affair in the chicanery, the rank dishonesty and the laziness of some of today’s media, albeit in more muted colours, where the ‘knocking copy’ staple diet of the print press of all shades is beholden to a party political system which many still choose to believe is the heartbeat and pinnacle of a modern democratic way of life, when it is no such thing.

The one thing we must avoid is to see ourselves as helpless victims of the press, rather we are complicit in their barely hidden agendas because we naively continue to buy their papers. We all have our favourite newspaper which we persuade ourselves gives the news to us straight, when what that means is a preference for buying and reading opinions consonant with our own predilections. This is precisely what every editor has in mind when s/he cracks the whip in the last hours and minutes of a feverish newsroom before going to press and decides which news to treat us to and which to hide from us before it isgiven the actual (meaning slanted) treatment in which it is clothed. We can talk about short-termism in investing. But nothing is more the slave of short-term thinking than the production of a daily newspaper.

If the daily press is beholden to the politicians it is no less beholden to the corporate world, no less prone to accept the sound bites from board reports and company press releases at face value. There may not be time to do better; staff at the newspaper may have been slimmed in order to manage online advertising competition. It is much simpler to echo the sexier, self-serving sound bites issued by the corporate world. And this is what sells the paper after all. Sadly, there is neither the will, or the wit, to challenge them.