I’ve recently started thinking the media’s role as the “Fourth Estate” was more than just a journalistic slogan — it feels like a vocation. But the deeper I’ve gone into Catholic dogmatic theology, the more I’ve realised that this isn’t just about civic duty or democratic checks and balances. It’s about truth. And truth isn’t just a concept — it’s Jesus Christ, the
Logos, the Word made flesh.
Dogmatic theology teaches that divine revelation — handed down through Scripture and Tradition — is safeguarded by the Church’s judicial role in deciding hotly contested theological and moral issues. Truth isn’t “crowd-sourced”. It comes from God. So when I look at the media today, I ask: is it still serving truth, or has it become a mirror for society’s fragmented desires? Are Christians' desires dragged along with the crowd too.
[Current usage for the estates, is executive, legislature, judiciary, and media]
The old idea of “estates” — clergy, nobility, commoners, with the fourth estate, the Press, (added around 1771 AD in a speech to the British Parliament*) — might have made sense in those times, but in the affluent West, it’s more like a historical metaphor than a living reality. The clergy no longer holds sway over public life, nobility’s mostly ceremonial or non-existent, and the commoners? We’ve morphed into consumers, “influencers”, and shareholders. The estate model assumes a kind of moral hierarchy, but modernity’s flattened that into a marketplace of competing narratives.
Still, I cling to the idea of the Fourth Estate — because it
could be prophetic. In Catholic theology, the prophetic office isn’t just about foretelling the future; it’s about confessing truth under oppression. That’s what the media
ought to do when it is honest and courageous. But when it compromises truth to gain clicks, or objectivity for ideology, it’s failing its vocation.
Catholics (ideally) believe that every institution — media included — is called to serve the common good. That means having firm foundations planted deeply in truth, being oriented toward justice, and open to grace. And grace is sorely needed in a world where trust in institutions is tanking faster than a dodgy crypto coin.
And if the media wants to reclaim its “soul”, it’ll need more than reform — it’ll need conversion.
* it is said in Wikipedia that:
Oxford English Dictionary attributes, ("without confirmation") the origin of the term to
Edmund Burke, who may have used it in a British parliamentary debate of 19–20 February 1771, on the opening up of press reporting of the
House of Commons of Great Britain. Historian
Thomas Carlyle reported the phrase in his account of the night's proceedings, published in 1840, attributing it to Burke.
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