Demise of the Fourth Estate does not bode well for the body politic

"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. It is not a figure of speech, or witty saying; it is a literal fact — very momentous to us in these times.”
— Thomas Carlyle

When the Founders penned the Constitution they focused mightily on making sure that no one branch of government could become so strong as to usurp so much power that its inevitable corruption could not be corrected by actions of another branches.

Then they added additional layers to their scheme of checks and balances, their mistrust of power, by including free speech and free press in the First Amendment so they could sound an alarm.

When any one aspect of that scheme is weakened, the whole is threatened.

A recent study at Princeton University offers evidence of this from a small niche. Researchers Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido — in a paper titled, “Do Newspapers Matter? Evidence from the Closure of The Cincinnati Post” — found that the closing the relatively small Cincinnati Post, whose paltry 27,000 circulation paled in comparison the dominant 200,000-subscriber Cincinnati Enquirer, appeared to impact the body politic of the community.

“The Cincinnati Post published its last edition on New Year's Eve 2007, leaving
the Cincinnati Enquirer as the only daily newspaper in the market. The next year,
fewer candidates ran for municipal office in the suburbs most reliant on the Post,
incumbents became more likely to win re-election, and voter turnout fell …” they found. “Although our findings are statistically imprecise, they demonstrate that newspapers — even underdogs such as the Post … can have a substantial and measurable impact on public life.”

One can’t help but wonder what the closing of the substantially larger Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer will mean for their respective communities. The entrenchment of incumbents alone is enough to warrant consternation.

Shortly before the study was published another Princetonian — Paul Starr a professor of communications and public affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton — penned a lengthy tome in The New Republic on the dangers to our system of governance in a void left by declining newspapers.

In “Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption),” Starr

offers an excellent history on the rise of the modern newspaper, a review of some financial alternatives for newspapers, an analysis of just what their demise might foretell and some warnings that we should not expect the scribblers on the Internet to fill the void.

“News coverage is not all that newspapers have given us,” Starr writes. “They have lent the public a powerful means of leverage over the state, and this leverage is now at risk. If we take seriously the notion of newspapers as a fourth estate or a fourth branch of government, the end of the age of newspapers implies a change in our political system itself. Newspapers have helped to control corrupt tendencies in both government and business. If we are to avoid a new era of corruption, we are going to have to summon that power in other ways. Our new technologies do not retire our old responsibilities.”

The stakes are that high.

Admittedly, a number of newspapers have shirked their responsibilities and succumbed to the entreaties of various politicians and political parties, and thus deserve the schadenfreude of those who gleefully applaud the agony of the press. But these people should realize that the result is more of what they so despise, not less.