Civics 101: The Fourth Estate

It’s National Newspaper Week, and I would like to report that we are celebrating with a fully staffed newsroom and everyone going home on time.

Instead, we have newspapers to get out.

Here we are, using all the volunteer help we can get, asking too much of our paid staff, and making it work with white knuckles and elbow grease. We keep going because our communities want local news and they support it.

That support has never been more important, especially this year, as our country marks 250 years of independence.

Long before Americans could argue in the comments section, they argued in newspapers. Printers put ideas into circulation that helped people question British rule and consider governing themselves. Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” was a pamphlet, and newspapers helped carry the debate it stirred. Apparently, Americans have never needed much encouragement to have an opinion.

Later, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay made their case for the Constitution in the essays we know as the “Federalist Papers.” Those arguments reached readers through New York newspapers.

I went looking to see whether they had anything to say about news itself.

It was Federalist No. 84, where Hamilton considered how people living far from the seat of government could know what their representatives were doing. Newspapers, he wrote, would be “expeditious messengers of intelligence” reaching even the most remote Americans.

Around here, we call that getting the paper out. If the people are supposed to govern themselves, they need some way to find out what is being done in their name.

The name Fourth Estate comes from Britain, where the Lords Spiritual, Lords Temporal, and Commons were the traditional three estates represented in Parliament. The press became known as a fourth force because reporters could tell the public what powerful people were doing and hold them accountable.

Here in America, the idea fits pretty well. We have three branches of government, and the press keeps an eye on all of them. It has no seat at the cabinet table and no vote in Congress. It can, however, ask what happened to the money. 

That question seldom improves the mood in the room, and throughout history, newspapers have given Americans information powerful people would sometimes rather keep to themselves.

Frederick Douglass founded The North Star to fight slavery and argue for equal rights. Nellie Bly, reporting for the New York World, went inside a women’s asylum and exposed the conditions there.

In 1892, after Ida B. Wells challenged lynching in the Memphis Free Speech, her newspaper office was destroyed, and her life was threatened. She kept investigating and writing. Her work reminds us that telling the truth can demand much more than putting up with an unpleasant phone call.

Decades later, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at The Washington Post kept digging into Watergate, helping expose wrongdoing that reached into the Nixon administration.

Those are famous names attached to famous stories. But much of this country’s reporting happens in small newsrooms, where someone reads a budget packet, sits through a meeting, or asks a question nobody particularly wants to answer.

That work needs doing here, too, and it doesn’t always earn us a warm welcome.

Someone once asked why they should support us: “Why would we support a paper that’s critical of us?”

My answer is pretty simple. If you don’t want stories about you doing stupid things, don’t do stupid things.

Of course, we have responsibilities, too. Check the facts. Give people a chance to explain. Correct mistakes.

But supporting a newspaper cannot mean buying its silence. You should be able to disagree with us and still want someone asking questions.

There are national efforts underway to save local news, with foundations, nonprofits, and big money. Press Forward launched with a goal of mobilizing half a billion dollars over five years. I hope those efforts succeed.

I also hope they remember the people already in the trenches.

Our volunteers give their time because they care. Our paid staff carries more work than it should. Our readers and advertisers help pay the bills. Together, they make another week possible.

And there is plenty of work. A community deserves to know how its money is spent and what its officials decide. It also deserves a record of its children, its businesses, its losses, and its accomplishments. Those stories belong to all of us.

For 250 years, Americans have needed information to make decisions about their country. We still need it to make decisions about our hometown.

This National Newspaper Week, we thank everyone helping us keep the lights on. We intend to keep shining them where they’re needed.