15: Media

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In 1787, the year of the Constitutional Convention, an Irish member of the British Parliament named Edmund Burke described reporters as a “fourth estate,” equal or superior to the three estates (the church, the nobles, and the commoners) that traditionally determined the course of European politics. Over a century later, American journalist Douglass Cater updated the concept for a democratic age when he deemed the press “the fourth branch of government.” News media have long been recognized as a formidable political force, albeit one that (in the United States at least) operates largely outside of formal government institutions.

Photograph of New York Times headquarters in New York City — The New York Times, one of the world’s most influential news organizations, is headquartered in a skyscraper bearing its name in downtown Manhattan.

Despite its powerful reputation, though, Americans pay surprisingly little attention to the media. We consume media, of course — staggering amounts of them, in fact. But when we read, listen to, or watch the news, we almost never look at the media themselves. Instead, we look through them at the events on the other side — the president giving a speech, the senators bickering in Congress, the candidates campaigning, the natural disasters or terrorist attacks whose images captivate us. Intellectually, we know the media are there, with their journalists and anchors and cameras and graphics, yet they become for all practical purposes invisible to us, just like the glass pane separating us from what we’re seeing when we look through a window.

But neglecting the glass between us and what we see can be dangerous (as any pigeon will tell you). If we forget about it, we won’t notice the ways it magnifies, minifies, blurs, obscures, or otherwise distorts our vision, and we might mistakenly attribute those qualities to something other than the window itself. Similarly, what we observe through media is not reality itself but one particular version of reality, filtered through a lens that, whether by accident or intention, does not always faithfully render the world as it truly is.

A media environment completely free of these distortions and limitations is impossible. Nor can we do away with media entirely and perceive the world directly: the world is far too big, and we are far to small, to personally encounter everything important to us. What we can do is will ourselves to think about media themselves — what they are, how they work, how they shape democratic politics — as a means of better understanding these windows to the world on which we rely.

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