I was watching 60 Minutes this evening…….

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And a story about the Broadway play Good Night, and Good Luck was airing. The show stars George Clooney, and is about Edward R. Murrow and his fight against McCarthyism. During the segment on 60 Minutes, Clooney is recorded telling the cast, "When the other three estates fail, when the judiciary and the executive and the legislative branches fail us, the fourth estate has to succeed.”

The Broadway show is based on a movie of the same name which was released in 2005. It is a very timely look at the current situation in our country. Like McCarthy, Trump and his cronies are using fear and intimidation to try to force the entire country to kowtow to their ideals. And like McCarthy, it is all based on a foundation of lies which is being swallowed whole by a large portion of the lesser educated and gullible members of our population.

Thomas Carlyle described in 1841 the power of the press as “the fourth estate.” He further stated, “There were three estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a fourth estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact.” Carlyle elaborated, “Printing, which comes necessarily out of writing, I say often, is equivalent to democracy: invent writing, democracy is inevitable.”

The faith in the press as the guardian of truth, the watchdog of power, the foundation of democracy—in brief, the fourth estate—lies at the heart of the liberal imagination of the west. It is the principle enshrined in the First Amendment, nestled in between freedom of religion and the freedom of assembly. “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” This foundational statement paid homage to the same dream. “Where the press is free and every man able to read,” Thomas Jefferson explained, “all is safe.”

Walter Cronkite put it this way: “A democracy ceases to be a democracy if its citizens do not participate in its governance. To participate intelligently, they must know what their government has done, is doing and plans to do in their name… This is the meaning of freedom of press. It is not just important to democracy, it is democracy.”

Hence why the Trump White House is so adamant about controlling the press; why they are eliminating access for legitimate news outfits and replacing them with extreme right-wing bloggers. It appears as though our citizenry is more eager to remain well informed about Kim Kardashian or Sean Diddy Combs than the latest conditions in Ukraine or the intricacies of our health care system. Oscar Wilde wrote—years ago to be sure, but his words still resonate—that “the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.”

Add in the fact that a large percentage of the US population seems to be devotees of a certain cable news network named after a small to medium sized omnivorous animal, and are more likely to hold mistaken beliefs about, well, you name it - global warming, health care, Iraq, than those who don’t watch cable news at all.

Which leaves us where we are today. We can only hope that enough will see the truth for what it is before it is too late.

In the infamous words of Edward R. Murrow, “Good Night, and Good Luck.”

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