Role of Journalism as The Fourth Estate of Democracy

Of the people, by the people, for the people is what we understand by democracy which leads us to understand the three pillars of it, namely legislative, executive and judiciary which in a layman’s language is lawmaking, law abiding and supervision respectively. In addition to this we have the fourth estate of democracy which is media, the informative one. Journalism as we know is about collecting, selecting information, writing, editing, photographing, broadcasting/publishing and owning a news organization. And therefore a journalist is known as the watchdog of the society.
Peeping back into history we see that journalism started way back in Rome where the printed papers were posted on the amphitheatre to inform the public. But it was Thomas Carlyle a Scottish satirical writer in the 17th century who initiated the phrase “The Fourth Estate” to journalism and further the coinage of this phrase was done by an Irish statesman Edmund Burke from the House of Commons in Britain in 1787.
We see that media is a very powerful pillar of our country, as it was only because of the power that Indira Gandhi had to censor media during the emergency in 1975. This proved that “pen is mightier than the sword”, and this is all what is journalism about. The function of media is not only to entertain but also to inform and educate. Journalism as a watchdog of the society tries to set an agenda for the public which can shake the grounds of the policy makers and can bring a tsunami in calm water. It has to its shoulders three responsibilities which are social, legal and professional and so it caters to all. Thus we can say that media is all powerful and can shake the base of the other three pillars.