Author: Jacqueline Laing

Of the fourth estate, Thomas Carlyle once vividly observed ‘Burke said there were three estates in parliament; but, in the reporters’ gallery yonder, there sat a fourth estate more important far than they all’. Now that clergy, nobles and commons are competing for celebrity status, all that remains of independent oversight of the publicity-seeking orders is the fourth. Yet as the Leveson report recommends compulsory state regulation of the press and greater concentration of power in the hands of politicians and their associates, we have recently been reminded, though it may have passed unnoticed, of the moral significance of press freedom.

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