ABSTRACT
In 1828, the young Whig historian Thomas Macaulay noticed a fundamental realignment in British politics. Edmund Burke’s three ‘estates’, the monarchy, parliament, and the established church, had to contend with another, Macaulay argued, for ‘The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm’ (Clive 1973: 124). With this argument, his biographer noted, ‘Macaulay penetrated beneath the formal structure of politics to put his finger on [a] great new force’, a nascent national media (Ibid.: 125). Macaulay was supported by his sometimes critic Thomas Carlyle who argued in 1848 that ‘the existence of an Unfettered Press’ represented a ‘grand modern fact’: ‘Is not The Times newspaper an open Forum, open as never Forum was before . . . One grand branch of the parliaments trade is obviously dead forever’ (Carlyle 1983: 277-8).
