ABSTRACT
The news media has a conflicted relationship with the platform giants, but at the same time it is forced to engage with them and with other social media channels because, increasingly, this is where the audience is to be found. At the heart of the question about the relationship between journalism, the social web and democracy is the central ideal of the “Fourth Estate” – journalism’s watchdog role, which theoretically holds those in powerful position responsible to the public. However, the history of the Fourth Estate and the material reality today show that the contemporary news media no longer represents a truly oppositional force to the powerful economic and political elite. Journalists today effectively work to keep the system going, by providing ideological comfort to the subordinate social classes who labor under a veneer of democratic form, but whose economic exploitation is never fundamentally questioned by the Fourth Estate press.
