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Which is to say, our fourth estate exercises greater institutional power than even the press of yore.

Partly, this reflects the secularization of the first estate. Our institution of arbitrating the cosmological balance of good and evil, having shed its role of keeper of parochial history and patron of public art, left a vacuum that consensus media has come to fill.

Yet also, this would seem to be a consequence of the democratization of media itself, both in its production and its consumption.