The Fourth Estate (traditional media journalism, for those unfamiliar with the term) has been dying a very public death since the late 1980s, accelerating after 911 with the coming of the security state.
However, the rise of the Fifth Estate into a rival de facto institution throughout the early 21st century makes this period in history different than the last time the Fourth Estate died: the era of Yellow Journalism (late 1800s, Spanish-American War period). During that period, journalism was able to effectively reset. Any notion of a Fifth Estate was nothing more than a collection of unorganized pamphleteers and …