The expression fourth capacity indicates the press. One indicates by extension all the media of fourth capacity, insofar as they can sometimes be used as Contre-pouvoir vis-a-vis the other capacities which incarnates the State.

The history of the uses of the expression can be recalled until Alexis de Tocqueville, in its work Of the democracy in America (1833). Tocqueville brings there a new classification of the capacities, which would be:

• the central capacity (in the United States, federal capacity), in which one finds the traditional separation of the capacities (Legislative power, Executive power and judicial Power);
• local authority (federate capacities);
• associative capacity (lobbies);
• the press.

By confusion, one often says that the fourth capacity made following the three traditional capacities (Legislative power, Executive power and judicial Power).

Some added with this list a fifth capacity, which would be that of the Public opinion (which would be detached from the press, in spite of an influence not of least of the press on the formation of the public opinion).

The important influence of the Media Mogul S on the opinion, press barons in the United States, concretized the existence of this fourth capacity compared to the three others, institutional and defined in the Constitution.

In practice

Extreme example of this capacity, the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst contributed, by articles going beyond the simple report/ratio of the foreign politics of Washington, with the declaration of war of the United States against the Spanish Empire which led to the takeover of Cuba in 1898. The legend concerning the character, mythifié in Citizen Kane, allots the origin of the war to him which it would have described, in particular using an opinion reasoned on the stakes for the country, in an article with the sensational accents appeared in its newspaper, the New York Morning Journal .

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• Citizen Kane , celebrates it film of Orson Welles (capacity of the media analyzes), Control on the TV ( Network ), film of Sidney Lumet