I grew up hearing that the press was the “fourth pillar” of democracy. A noble idea: the media standing apart from power, holding it accountable, shining light into the corners where authority would rather keep things hidden. But when I look closely at history, when I examine moments of real consequence, I find not courage but compliance. The press, more often than not, has not been a check on power, but its amplifier. Not a watchdog, but a loudspeaker.

Let’s go back in a time machine when Galileo was using Science to explore his curiosities. Here was a man peering through a telescope, daring to suggest that the Earth was not the center of the universe. His findings threatened not just the Church’s theology, but also the political authority built on it. Did the “media” of his pamphlets, sermons, printed tracts stand with him? Of course not. They echoed the condemnations, mocked his science, and cemented the narrative of heresy. Truth was not only inconvenient; it was criminal.

Agree that was a very long time back and the days of autocracy. Almost four centuries later, in the British Empire during the Second World War, the newspapers in London thundered about Hitler’s brutality and Japan’s barbarism, yet remained curiously quiet about the crimes committed under their own flag. Bengal starved in 1943, millions dead, while the press dutifully reported on the nobility of the British war effort. At home, power needed the myth of moral superiority, and the media obliged. Colonial suffering didn’t fit the story; so it was made invisible. One person killed thousands just to feed brutality and yet the press didn’t highlight it.

The American media during Vietnam began in a similar cheerleading act. They repeated the Pentagon’s glowing assessments, trumpeted the domino theory, spoke of noble sacrifice against communism. It took years, and the stark intrusion of televised carnage, before the truth broke through: My Lai, napalm, the futility of the war. By then, too many lives had been consumed by a lie that was polished and broadcast daily.

And then came Iraq. If ever there was a moment when the media could have lived up to its lofty self-image, it was here. Instead, they became stenographers for the state. Weapons of mass destruction. Saddam linked to 9/11. Democracy around the corner. The press didn’t just repeat these claims—they sold them. They put Colin Powell’s UN slideshow on repeat, quoted anonymous officials like scripture, and ridiculed inspectors who found nothing. Only much later, once the war was irreversible, came the half-hearted apologies. Truth arrived after the fact, when it no longer mattered.

And now Gaza. I watch with a sick familiarity as the cycle repeats. Thousands of civilians bombed, children buried in rubble, hospitals without power. Entire neighborhoods erased. Yet the headlines find their euphemisms: “clashes”, “airstrikes”, “self-defense”. When Israel bombs, it is framed as necessity; when Palestinians resist, it is framed as terror. The scale of atrocity is softened by language, or excused by context. The media doesn’t just distort reality; it launders it, making the unthinkable sound rational.

When I connect these threads; Galileo silenced, Bengal starved, Vietnam sanitized, Iraq fabricated, Gaza whitewashed; I see a pattern too clear to ignore. The media does not stand outside power. It bends to it, merges with it, becomes its story machine. It convinces us that lies are truth, that crimes are accidents, that the powerful are victims.

The mythology of the fourth pillar is seductive because it flatters us into believing we live in a system where truth inevitably emerges. But history tells me the opposite: truth only survives in fragments, carried by those willing to be mocked, censored, sidelined. The media, with all its might, has been far more often the fourth arm of control than the fourth pillar of freedom.

And so I can’t help but wonder: perhaps democracy does not fail because its institutions are weak. Perhaps it fails because its loudest voice is never really ours to begin with.

And so I end where the cynics and the realists converge: in recognizing that truth is never simply handed down; it is wrestled into being, often against the very organs that claim to defend it.

In the words of Malcolm X;

The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power.