“Burke said there were three estates in Parliament, but in the reporters’ gallery yonder there sat a fourth estate more important than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact…Printing, which comes necessarily out of writing, I say often, is equivalent to democracy; invent writing and democracy is inevitable…Whoever can speak, speaking now for the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenuers or garnitures: the requisite thing is that he have a tongue which others will listen to.”

Since the invention of the printing press the mass media’s effect on politics has been hard to understate. Political theories have been born and died in the span of time marked by the evolution of what we now call mass communication. In this time liberal democracy has come to the forefront as the basic theory behind the systems of government now employed by most all western nations . Together democracy, mass communication, or mass media, capitalism, and the entrepreneurial spirit, which comes there from, have sparked the most rapid peri

To illustrate the degree to which the western media is in fact a free press one need only to compare it to its counterpart in a non-democratic society. Take China.

There is no reason to believe that China Central Television would treat political content any differently, and in fact the country’s “long followed practice of keeping its people in the dark about most things” is acknowledged by most western journalists. So then, when compared to the state systems of non-democratic societies the degree to which western mass media are free is quite apparent

od of innovation and invention in the history of the world and some of the freest, most open, and politicly legitimate societies ever to exist. In theory then, mass media is not only beneficial to a democratic public sphere; it is quite imperative. Still, the world does not exist merely in theory, and theory and reality often differ. Today’s mass media, as it has evolved, contains many contradictions that hinder its ability to provide “equal access…to sources of information and equal opportunities to participate in the debates from which political decisions rightly flow.” Nonetheless, because today’s mass media exists in a free press environment the media is of great benefit to democracy.

If this early press can be seen as successful because it was free from the state then the next logical question becomes whether or not today’s mass media is also. Certainly today’s situation is quite different in that the media is no longer directly opposed to the state, but the question to whether or not it is free from it is harder to decipher. Some would argue that the media is not free today. For example, during war time government sources are sometimes the only sources a reporter may have available. Governments often restrict access to battlefields and active soldiers, sometimes even detaining journalist that wander out of “press pool” areas. Furthermore, government press releases and spokes people are most often the source of the buzzwords and sound bites that frame a news story. However, to say that the media is state controlled, or not free from the state is a falsehood. Independent journalists are free to print what they find

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