Our Mission

CheckYoSource - Restoring Trust in the Fourth Estate

The Fourth Estate keeps government, legislators and big business in check by keeping society or the public informed. Investigative journalism plays a big part in uncovering bribery and corruption and in uncovering human rights violations. There was severe state censorship of the media during Apartheid, with the Government of the time fully understanding the power of The Fourth Estate, they deliberately hid what was really going on in South Africa from the public and many editors and journalists were imprisoned and beaten for ‘telling it as it was’.

An article The media as the Fourth Estate in The Conversation says, “The Fourth Estate describes the journalists’ role in representing the interests of the people in relation to the business and political elites who claim to be doing things in our names … If we accept the premise of the Fourth Estate, we also have to ask ourselves if the national and the public interest are the same thing. It might be easy to think that they are, but it would be a mistake.”

It goes on to say that it is often in the national interest to keep things from the citizens, but the public interest is about disclosure and the people’s right to know. The Fourth Estate is a civil watchdog. It states, “Today, governments that claim to act in the public interest must face daily scrutiny of their actions. They must be called to account when overstepping the bounds of what citizens will support, or when taking actions that are clearly not in our interests. We rely on journalists and the news media to do this job on our behalf.”