Fourth Estate

Without quality journalism there’s no way to keep those in power honest. People don’t know what’s factual and not factual.

Fourth Estate:

The Fourth Estate is an international journalism public benefit corporation. Their mission statement reads: It is our mission to contribute to a healthy society by fostering, supporting and incubating a sustainable and vibrant free press. “Who are we to say what is right or wrong for a society? “ questioned Jeff Brown, Founder and Executive Director of the Fourth Estate. “We believe in free press and the power of information to make people's lives better.“

Confronting Oppression

The overall impact of an organization like the Fourth Estate is the promotion and assurance of rights of free expression. “To me, it’s simple,” Brown stated. “Without quality journalism there’s no way to keep those in power honest. People don’t know what’s factual and not factual. We need nonpartisan, truth-based journalism to ensure that people know the truth of what’s going on around them.”

The overall impact of an organization like the Fourth Estate is the promotion and assurance of rights of free expression. “To me, it’s simple,” Brown stated. “Without quality journalism there’s no way to keep those in power honest. People don’t know what’s factual and not factual. We need nonpartisan, truth-based journalism to ensure that people know the truth of what’s going on around them.”

“Companies misuse the law to censor rightful free speech,” Brown explained. “For example, if a company does something and a publisher writes an article about it, then the company could file a DMCA complaint with the upstream host of the publisher. Since most web hosts won’t take the effort to resolve the issue, they’ll simply take the publisher’s site down (often without informing site owner) just to be done with it. Often, the host will even decide not to rehost the content even if it’s in the right.” To combat that challenge, Fourth Estate created Scoop host, which is hosting for journalism entities and journalists that will help protect their legal rights.

“Another difficult challenge the Fourth Estate fights against are direct online attacks that take journalists’ content offline. “One of the more troubling issues we see is corporate interests and governments using cyber tools to censor journalists,” Brown commented. “These cyber attacks overload a publications infrastructure leaving it unable to send or receive future content, essentially removing the publication from the Internet.”

To combat this second challenge, The Fourth Estate has partnered with Cloudflare’s Project Galileo to sponsor journalists who are in need of protection from these types of attacks. “Project Galileo is an enterprise-grade layer of protection that helps organizations defend against DDoS attacks,” Brown commented. “I know that there are publishers and journalists that would be being censored right this moment if programs like Project Galileo were not in place.”