For nearly two centuries the idea that the press plays a central role in the management and maintenance of a representative democracy has framed debates about the media. The eighteenth-century claim, that the press was entitled to its own independent standing in the political system, as the Fourth Estate, has become an ideal which continues to influence the attitudes of those working in the late twentieth century news media, as well as politicians and citizens. The press, in the words of Jürgen Habermas was the public sphere's ‘pre-eminent institution’ (Habermas, 1992: 181) and despite profound changes to society, communications and political life, the modern news media, and those engaged in its production, continue to embrace this institutional role.

The role as the public sphere's ‘pre-eminent institution’ was not conferred, but won during the political, economic and social transformations of the Enlightenment. At a time of limited suffrage, but increasing literacy, ‘the press’ – in the words of George Reeve editor of The Edinburgh Review, who in 1855 penned a classic formulation of the Fourth Estate – ‘created the wont which it supplies’ (Reeve, 1855: 470). As Rupert Murdoch observed 106 years later, before he became the owner of one of the largest media empires the world has ever known: ‘Unless we can return to the principles of public service we will lose our claim to be the Fourth Estate. What right have we to speak in the public interest when, too often, we are motivated by personal gain?’ (Mayer, 1964:51).