If, as has been argued in the previous chapter, the late twentieth-century news media industry is a flawed embodiment of the Fourth Estate, the question remains whether journalists, editors and producers, desire, or are able, to muster sufficient intellectual authority to stake a meaningful claim to custodianship of the ideal.

In this and the following chapter I examine empirically the attitudes of Australian journalists towards the Fourth Estate. This is done by describing, evaluating and comparing the information gathered from the Media and Democracy survey of two groups of Australian journalists

The data provides a snapshot of the attitudes of the Australian journalists surveyed in 1992 towards their work and its place in public life. The full survey, its methodology and results are set out in the appendix.

The data provides a springboard to consider of the roles, practices, methods and attitudes of Australian journalists and to test whether the contests to the Fourth Estate, examined in chapter 5, can be sustained from the perspective of the journalists surveyed.