| 释义 |
fourth estate A term first used by historian Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) in his book, On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), to describe the press. Novelist Jeffrey Archer, in his book The Fourth Estate (1996), observed: “In May 1789, Louis XVI summoned to Versailles a full meeting of the ‘Estate General’. The First Estate consisted of three hundred nobles. The Second Estate, three hundred clergy. The Third Estate, six hundred commoners. Some years later, after the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, looking up at the Press Gallery of the House of Commons, said, ‘Yonder sits the Fourth Estate, and they are more important than them all.’” Note: The Estate General refers to the British Parliament. The First Estate refers to the Lords Temporal and the Second Estate to the Lords Spiritual, the two of which later combined to form the House of Lords. The Third Estate refers to the House of Commons. The Fourth Estate refers to the public press, which in those days was the newspapers. The contemporary reference is to the mass media, including both print and electronic media. |