The mass medium is often referred to in the United States as the " fourth estate . " In the United States , the unfiltered information that diarist cater to the public serves as an important check on the country ’s three branches ofgovernment : executive , legislative and judicial . It also assist mass stay up to date with the issues of the 24-hour interval , giving them the news they need to make informed decisions about their elect representatives . In fact , the potent hand that the medium often plays in presidential and other elections also feed the idea of the press as the fourth branch of government activity .
Whichever way you slit it , the business of medium is rapidly change . Technological advances have goad a shift to real - meter , digital platforms and spawned a slew of new tools that journalists can now use to strain audiences around the world . Among those tools are increasingly - available drone machine . These diminutive flying machine have the powerfulness to provide a bird ’s oculus prospect of news as it breaks , peculiarly in state of affairs where it would be unsafe or hard to get a reporter on the ground [ source : Smith ] .
Whether it ’s gather intelligence in a strange state of war zone , monitoring disaster scenes or just checking in on agricultural crops , one of the bad benefits of radio-controlled aircraft is their ability to render video and exposure footage from hard - to - accomplish vantage points . Sure , a newspaper could rent ahelicopteror woodworking plane to get guess of a wildfire in onward motion or send an intrepid reporter into the middle of a civil war . Using a $ 1,000 machine to do some of the clayey lifting , however , ply both fiscal and human cost savings [ source : Smith ] .
Take , for example , CBS ’s usage of a drone to capture the remote control , largely abandoned Chernobyl nuclear magnate industrial plant that still teem with harmful radiation after a 1986 detonation . Producers used a video recording camera strapped to a pocket-sized quadcopter to capture what they call " a haunting postcard " from the disaster site that viewers might otherwise never see . Similarly , journalists at Russia Today were able to raise their coverage on tearing unrest in Ukraine with overhead , poke - collected telecasting [ sources : Smith , Cooke , Russia Today ] .
For the metre being , however , the use of drones to capture news stateside faces a significant obstruction in the form of the Federal Aviation Administration . The FAA currently considers media request to employ drones for newsgathering in the United States on a compositor’s case - by - case basis . The regime generally feed the okay only in " desexualize " locations that are unremarkably far from any character of action that medium would actually be concerned in covering [ sourceSchroyer ] .
The good news program for newshounds is that the drone blockade is likely fading . A lot of propose rules issue by the FAA would allow media groups to use small drones , as long as operators first pass an aeronautic knowledge run . In the interim , a radical of news outlets that include the New York Times , CNN and the Washington Post is presently working with Virginia Tech to screen drones for news purposes . see like the fourth demesne is getting ready to vanish the favorable skies [ sources : Schroyer , Somaiya ] .
