ABSTRACT
Whenever debates over journalism’s role in empowering citizens within democratic societies take place, the notion of the press as a ‘fourth estate’ invariably surfaces as a point of contention. Participants may well harken back to descriptions of Britain in the first half of the eighteenth century, when a lively array of unruly – albeit almost exclusively wealthy, white and male – voices were beginning to circulate in news journals. These voices were willing and able to take issue with the Crown’s conduct and Parliament’s legislative performance, and vociferously so. Jürgen Habermas (1989), in his well-known treatise on the public sphere, argued that these commercially-based journals were constitutive of a growing ‘public spirit’, one intent on replacing what had been until then a ‘party spirit’. If this challenging, often enraged temperament found its expression in publications such as John Tutchin’s Observator (1702), Daniel Defoe’s The Review (1704) and Jonathan Swift’s Examiner (1710), for Habermas it is Nicholas Amhurst’s Craftsman (1726), together with Edward Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine (1731), which signalled that ‘the press was for the first time established as a genuinely critical organ of a public engaged in critical political debate: as the fourth estate’ (1989: 60). Indeed, with the decline of private clubs and the coffee houses, the latter being a principal forum for the circulation of news of the day, the public was now largely being ‘held together’ through an independent press advancing ‘professional criticism’ (1989: 51).
