the.com/fourth estate

means A name for journalists and the news media as a collective power that shapes public life, even though no one voted them into office.

from The phrase builds on the old notion of society's 'estates' — in European tradition, the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners were the first three estates of the realm. 'Fourth estate' adds the press as an unofficial fourth power alongside them. The coinage is often credited to the 18th-century British statesman Edmund Burke, who supposedly gestured toward the press gallery in Parliament and called it a fourth estate more important than the other three — a vivid story, though historians note the attribution is shaky and the phrase may simply have crystallized in the political writing of that era rather than from one dramatic quip.