SANTA MONICA, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Journalists are members of the Fourth Estate for their role in government accountability.
Patrice Schneider, chief strategy officer for the Media Development Loan Fund, believes a Fifth Estate has arisen, however, in the form of social media. And the evidence of its birth as a government watchdog system lies in Libya, Syria, Iran, and other countries — even the United States — where bloggers and tweeters have informed the world about government affairs in places where journalists have been shut out.
“They have broken down the gatekeeper,” Schneider says.
A free press, of course, is a tenet to any free democracy. Budget cutbacks and political foils that blur the role of journalists in democracy, however, call into question the effectiveness of such a free press in today’s day and age — the age when technology trumps tomorrow morning’s newspaper.
Jeanne Bourgault, president of Internews Network, agrees with Schneider. Her organization is proof positive of the Fifth Estate concept. Internews establishes, and supports media outlets as well as trains journalists in more than 70 countries around the world.
In the developing world, where MDLF and Internews mostly operate, the importance and power of the Fifth Estate is profound. Services such as Ushahidi change the landscape of journalism. (Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, is a website initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Since then it has grown to increase transparency and allow the disenfranchised to have their voices heard. It’s a form of crowd sourcing.) The power of Facebook and Twitter, of course, have been shown and seen.
And while it’s true that more investments need to be made in arming people in the Third World with media tools that we take for granted (Tweet: “I’m stuck in traffic) so they can engender a free press and therefore a more democratic world (making our world safer, by the way), there are issues.
I pointed this out to both Schneider and Bourgault when we sat on a panel together at SOCAP, the social capital markets conference in San Francisco earlier this week. Find out more about the conference.
The problem that I see most with user-generated content is the immediate lack of filter. Hence, inaccurate or false news can spread like wildfire. (This is also why Internews is such an important organization; it trains journalists.)
In the United States, of course, the media landscape is entirely different; we enjoy a free press and are struggling to keep it, well, free from the tugs of political and corporate bias. Moreover, traditional media companies are struggling financially.
In other parts of the world, where the biggest portion of the world’s population lives, they are just starting out. They need our money and our experience.
There are huge opportunities to profit in this media terrain. And, by the way, spread the tools to build democracy around the world.
So consider investing in the Fifth Estate. But don’t just do it here, look outside the U.S. to places where education and information aren’t marginal— they are critical to an open and safe society.