A sociocultural grouping of outlier views is influencing public discourse and driving change.
By George Gay
In its Winter 2023/2024 white paper, Philip Morris International examines the increasing influence of the Fifth Estate on public discourse. “Encompassing a vast and diverse range of independent commentators, social media users, content creators and online communities, the Fifth Estate poses unprecedented challenges and opportunities for established institutions by empowering individuals and citizen-led movements to drive change,” the company stated in a press note introducing the paper.
The Fifth Estate “landscape” is said to comprise online communities, independent commentators, citizen journalists, bloggers, vloggers, social media users, grassroots advocacy bodies, consumer forums, commenters, and cultural and other movements while the paper is said to be informed by the results of a survey conducted by Povaddo on behalf of PMI between Dec. 6 and Dec. 13, 2023, among 6,048 general population adults aged 21 and older in Brazil, Italy, South Africa, South Korea, the U.K. and the U.S.
“The Fifth Estate has become a significant societal force that can be leveraged for good or ill,” Moira Gilchrist, PMI’s chief communications officer, was quoted in the press note as saying. “On the one hand, the digital technologies that underpin it enable everyday people to stand up for what matters to them and help drive broad societal action.
“Conversely, this new power center can favor emotion and ideology over facts, perpetuating polarization and misinformation. The question facing businesses, regulators and society at large concerns how we can help steer this emerging force in a positive direction and address the valid concerns being expressed.”
I welcome the paper and the debate I hope it will encourage, and for that reason, I would recommend that the subscribers to this magazine take the trouble to read it if they haven’t done so already. As my contribution to the debate, I would like to make a few observations, some of which are not covered in the paper, and some are.
Much of what Gilchrist had to say in the part of her opening remarks quoted above is uncontroversial, I would have thought, though one surely must add the proviso that a significant proportion of the world’s population—perhaps a quarter to a third of it—live under autocracies where they can stand up for what matters to them only if they are willing to put their liberties and even their lives on the line.
But what brings me up short is the word “steer” in the final sentence. Is the Fifth Estate something that should or could be steered, who gets to choose what the “positive direction” is in which it should be steered, and who should steer it?
The paper is titled “Rethink Disruption: The Rise of the Fifth Estate,” so it is unsurprising that the potential of the Fifth Estate is seen as being embedded in mass participation and the disruption—hopefully progressive—that can cause. And this mass participation is compared with the hierarchical power bases that have existed in the past and still exist, including the traditional media that make up the Fourth Estate.
What puzzles me is that, on my reading, the paper speaks positively about “structured examples of the Fifth Estate.” Surely, a structured Fifth Estate is just the Fourth Estate under a different name. Somewhere within that structure will emerge those with the power—the gatekeepers, as the paper refers to them. What is the difference between the interactions within a structured Fifth Estate and the letter pages of a newspaper operating as part of the Fourth Estate, which is well guarded by its gatekeepers?
I suppose that you could argue that without structure, the Fifth Estate descends into chaos and that much misused term, anarchy, while structure can support democracy while driving change. But is this the reality on the ground? Was the early success of the Arab Spring down, at least in part, to mass, chaotic participation while its ultimate failure stemmed from a lack of structure in that participation? Perhaps.
I suppose you could also argue that the objectives of the Arab Spring were above the pay grades of those messaging their way to revolution, but where does this leave the Fifth Estate? Is it there just to pick up the crumbs that fall from the tables of the people who continue to gorge on power and drive us toward endless wars and environmental catastrophes?
Importantly, is there more democracy now than before the advent of the Fifth Estate or less? Does democracy work better now than before the arrival of the Fifth Estate? I would say that the answer to both questions is a resounding no, at least in the U.K., where I live.
Of course, the U.K. is something of an outlier in the countries surveyed because it is hardly a democracy. Our head of state is hereditary while more than half of our politicians are unelected, with 26 of them being theologians representing the First Estate. Recently, protests in the U.K., even walking slowly in the street, have been made illegal.
And it isn’t only in the U.K. where this is a problem. In a piece in the Feb. 8 issue of the London Review of Books that takes a wider view while focusing on Germany, the U.K. and the U.S., Jan-Werner Mueller says, “[b]oth the legal and physical space for protest is being shrunk.” And you must wonder whether this is because of the rise of the Fifth Estate rather than despite it.
Even within democracies, those desperate to hang onto power will surely see the rise of networked people and groups with radical ideas as being a threat. You would have to be terribly naive to believe that the hold of those with entrenched power who pay only lip service to democracy is going to be overcome long-term by a bunch of people armed with mobile phones, up against police forces becoming ever more militarized.
Of course, the overthrow of governments or the weeding-out of the corrupting forces within our political systems is not what PMI had in mind when it produced its paper, which, I guess, was aimed at promoting a debate around tobacco harm reduction (THR). In a section titled “PMI Viewpoint,” which starts with a quote by CEO Jacek Olczak, “[c]igarettes belong in museums,” the paper says that PMI is on a mission to end cigarette smoking as quickly as possible.
“Embracing the role of individuals and encouraging a people-centric debate involving policymakers, public health authorities and civil society is critical to achieving that goal,” it says. Elsewhere, it adds: “Corporations and institutions can support the best of the Fifth Estate by fostering open debates on issues that matter, promoting diverse voices and engaging responsibly with online communities.”
But this is not really a “debate,” I would suggest. If I were to say that I believed cigarette smoking was a better alternative than the consumption of new-generation products, I would not be part of the debate, even if I produced evidence to support my ideas. The debate is over. According to the paper, what remains is working out how best to achieve the objective, which is switching smokers to “better alternatives.”
To my way of thinking, however, it must be accepted that while manufacturers of new-generation products may, where it is legal to do so, put forward their products as “better alternatives,” it is surely up to the smoker to decide whether they are—a point that PMI does make. What, after all, is “better?”
Many readers of this magazine, like me, have asked smokers who have tried less risky alternative products why they didn’t stick with them and been told something like they are just not cigarettes. Less frequently, others will cite environmental concerns, which I believe is one way THR advocates have let themselves down. They should by now have caused exacting research to have been conducted into the relative demerits of smoking and vaping in respect of the environment.
Because they have not, as far as I am aware, they find themselves having to oppose bans on single-use vapes on the specious grounds of the illegal trade, not on environmental grounds. It is little wonder that THR advocates’ championing of single-use vapes is seen by their detractors as more about profit than the welfare of smokers.
Of course, PMI employs some very smart people who are aware of these issues. As part of its viewpoint, it is said that the key to transitioning away from smoking lies in “enacting policies that build awareness and increase the acceptability, availability and affordability of these better products.” The idea that there is still a need to increase acceptability is clearly a tacit acknowledgment that currently, a lot of smokers are justified in dismissing alternatives as just not being cigarettes.
The viewpoint goes on to say that embracing a people-centric debate based on science and free of misinformation is essential. But here, I think there is a danger that the debate is slipping into nice words and phrases, “science” and “free of misinformation,” that have little meaning. Science can be used for good, but it is often used to mislead and create misinformation. There is no way I can see that most smokers can distinguish good science from bad, nor, often, information from misinformation, and I don’t see how that situation can be altered by the Fifth Estate, structured or not.
And, in part, THR advocates are to blame for the confusion over information and misinformation. In their haste, for whatever reason, to winkle smokers away from cigarettes, they have been willing to use what I would regard as dubious figures and facts, so I support the paper’s position regarding the importance of fact-checking. But even here, you run into problems.
I mean, how far back do you go? Whose word do you accept? Is it acceptable to state, based on World Health Organization authority, that 8 million smokers die prematurely of smoking-related diseases each year? The claims made within such a statement do not amount to facts, but tobacco control and THR advocates seem to wave them through.
In the end, it seems to me that there need be no conflict between the Fourth and Fifth Estates. The honest players in both can complement each other. In the U.K., we have had several major scandals recently, which have been uncovered by the Fourth Estate, but the Fifth Estate has helped keep the pressure on the government to rectify the problems uncovered.
That pressure doesn’t always work, however, because the government is under pressure from other directions, and this is the pressure that concerns me. Whether you are talking about the Fourth or Fifth Estates, you can be reasonably confident that you can grasp what they are doing—their agendas.
Largely, their cards are on the table, which is more than can be said for those of what I shall call the Sixth Estate, perhaps the Fifth Column: the corporate lobbyists, including those working within so-called think tanks whose funding is obscure and whose influence is networked. I cannot help thinking that the reason why I may no longer walk slowly in the street for fear of arrest—something that is not just of passing concern to an old guy such as me—is down to lobbying by some of these shadowy figures.
Finally, the Fifth Estate is founded generally on the existence of the smartphone, and, indeed, many of the illustrations in the PMI paper might convince the casual observer that it was a generic advertisement for such devices. But I am told that smartphones are having the effect of undermining attention spans. Is it possible to have a serious, reasoned debate when people scroll through a white paper to get to the pictures of dogs dressed as cosmonauts?
