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Comment by cowpig | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the media the fourth estate?

I can't find any way to interpret this excerpt such that it makes sense.

How does anyone have "monopoly control over fact checking"?

And I also can't think of a way to favorably interpret that statement, given that I consider fact-checking to be an integral component of any information dissemination system.

Like many of Ben Thompson's articles, I find his ideas here compelling, but I also find myself feeling like he's an industry apologist and it clouds his thinking/makes him myopic.

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I think he made a logical leap based around the US political parties and wealthy elites' influence over the fourth estate - sanctioned political debates on CNN, sources of information with perceived authority such as Fox News, etc. While I also think it's explained poorly, there may be a connection here to his point about the largest advertisers (politician and large corporations) who fund the media which is meant to check them.

That seems like a lot of hand-waving to me.

> this was the context for Edmund Burke’s remarks in 1787 that “There are Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sits a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.”

There's this quote early in the article about the Fourth Estate being the most powerful, and yet by the end I'm supposed to assume all these things to accept this claim that "monopoly control" of the Second Estate exists on fact-checking?

What I actually see is an article where someone started with a conclusion (that some sort of free-market/libertarianism/lassaiz-faire/whatever brand of let tech companies do whatever they want is The Way) and then spent a lot of time thinking about how to reach it.

TFA spells out the estates being referenced in detail:

In Europe the first three estates are a reference to how society was organized throughout the Middle Ages: the First Estate was the church, the second was the nobility, and the third were the commoners....

Fourth is the press. Fifth has been variously attributed, but here is being applied to online activity generally. It was ascribed to bloggers specifically in 2006.

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