Traditionally, society and government were divided into the clergy, the aristocracy, and everybody else, but Thomas Macaulay wrote that "The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm."

The French Revolution had legalized newspapers (!), and revolutionaries like Camille Desmoulins moonlighted as journalists. In Britain and America, journalists and commentators like John Wilkes and Thomas Paine, often supported by media moguls like Benjamin Franklin, pushed the journalistic envelope.

The growing freedom of the press enabled major exposes by journalists and writers like Nellie Bly, Emile Zola, Ida Tarbell and Jack Anderson.

While the U.S.A. has long been justly proud of its role as the great example of press freedom, American conduct has deteriorated in comparison with the rest of the world, and in 2011 - 2012 Reporters Without Borders listed the United States as 47th out of 179 nations in its Press Freedom Index; the USA's score has been sinking because of security-related press restrictions and harassment.

Political junkies tend to think that the First Amendment applies to political debate, muckraking, and exposes. Certainly, there are many political shenanigans to expose.

And many organizations devote their resources to exposing shenanigans.

• The Center for Media and Democracy maintains PRWatch, "Reporting on spin and disinformation since 1993," the Center for Public Integrity reveals abuses of power, corruption and dereliction of duty, and SourceWatch, a "collaborative resource for citizens and journalists looking for documented information about the corporations, industries, and people trying to influence public policy and public opinion." The Sunlight Foundation aims at making government accountable and transparent. Taxpayers for Common Sense works to "to increase transparency and expose and eliminate wasteful and corrupt subsidies, earmarks, and corporate welfare." And Follow the Money follows the (political) money.
• Who watches the watchdogs? From the Left, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and Media Matters; from the Right, Accuracy in Media (AIM); from the ivied towers of Academia, the American Journalism Review (AJR); from the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ, aka the horse's mouth), Quill magazine. Of course, Harvard has its own Nieman Watchdog.
• Julian Assange's Wikileaks is still on-line. A slightly saner version is OpenLeaks. If you want my opinion about the Wikileaks affair, see my op-ed on WikiLeaks: Where have we heard this before?.
• Political ads are analyzed by the Campaign Media Analysis Group, and look up who is putting political money where at the National Institute of Money in State Politics or the Center for Responsive Politics.
• The liberal American Association of University Professors and the Right libertarian Foundation for Individual Rights in Education watch academia.

• Politico is a sort of newspaper for newspapers.
• Roll Call is a newspaper on Capital Hill.

• The University of Pennsylvannia's Annenberg Public Policy Center maintains FactCheck.
• ProPublica is one of the leading online investigative news outlets.
• PolitiFact compares public statements with facts -- or occasionally with its own interpretations of the facts.
• Snopes is the great collector of urban legends and internet myths.
• The Washington Post's Fact Checker checks statements by politicians.

• Political Compass is a site that asks you some questions and then plots your position on the political map.
• Project Implicit relies on rapid questions to get responses past your internal censors - and presumably detect the level of your prejudices.

• Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Rutherford Institute, and the Southern Poverty Law Center are concerned with social and governmental misconduct.
• Some organizations defend the rights of particular marginalized groups, such as the Anti-Defamation League, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the International Campaign for Tibet, Islamophobia Watch, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Organization for Women, and Survival International.
• Some organizations defend particular rights, most notably the freedoms of expression and conscience, thought and belief. Such organizations include Article 19, the Becket Fund, Forum 18, International PEN, and Reporters Without Borders.

Removing our ideological blinkers, what is the world really like? In the long run, people and peoples who wear such blinkers end up winning Darwin Awards, so the instinct for self-preservation should impel us to be a little realistic at times.

Organizations with this in mind include:

• Environmental organizations like the Audubon Society, the Earthwatch Institute, Greenpeace, the Sierra Culb, and the the World Wildlife Fund, and WorldWatch. See also Wikipedia's List of environmental organizations.
• Consumer organizations like the Consumers' Union, which publishes Consumers' Reports the association of "public interest research groups" that make up the Federation of State PIRGs,
• Organizations and publications like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Center for Science in the Public Interest the Union of Concerned Scientists.

From quaestors to inspectors general, governments have hired their own watchdogs. Sometimes these watchdogs watch the government itself, while other watchdogs monitor the activities of others.

Nowadays, there are government watchdog agencies that watch the government. These include ...

And there are government agencies that monitor other important things -- yes, Mr. Jindal, volcano monitoring is a priority.

• President Coolidge said that the business of America is business; if so, then we should keep an eye on it. Keeping an eye on the financial side are the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
• The Environmental Protection Agency maintains a Toxic Release Inventory of dangerous waste locations and management.

In ancient times, an oracle was a medium who spoke for a god. Modern oracles speak for the facts: out of idealism, pride, or habit, some people are devoted to accuracy, to getting the facts and the details. This is not a neutral occupation: accurate facts are not welcome among politicians, pundits, and ideologues.

Authorities have a mixed press. In ancient times, everyone was supposed to listen to kings and priests, while certain people -- who were supposed to speak truth to power -- sometimes enjoyed some immunity for what they said or sang: prophets, minstrels, jesters and sages. But while prophets and priests pointed fingers at each other, commoners may have asked, who do these people think they are, anyway? Nevertheless, we now live in a bureaucratized society overseen by experts, and often those experts are valuable -- if fallible -- sources of information.

It is no longer possible for a single person to sit down and write a dictionary, or to be the go-to person for all scientific issues. It takes a large organization to collect, filter, and present data in an accessible way. Since these distillations are inevitably distortions of reality, one often winds up having to trust the competence and integrity of some organization. That does not mean that one should rely on organizations that one agrees with; in fact, the most reliable organizations will maintain a staff with diverse perspectives in order to avoid the danger of groupthink, i.e., of imposing a harmonious uniformity of opinion. Remember, caveat emptor.

There are two views of information development, as outlined in Eric Raymond's essay on the Cathedral and the Bazaar. A cathedral work is produced in isolation, and presented to the public when completed. A bazaar work is produced in public, with kibbitzing permitted or even encouraged. These two approaches define the world's two great encyclopedias:

• To the Encyclopedia Britannica, "facts matter," and the editors and (selected and screened) contributors put enormous effort goes into getting them right. As one might expect of a cathedral production, passersby are permitted to look in the windows, but only subscribers are permitted inside.
• Wikipedia relies on passersby -- often hiding behind pseudonyms -- to correct each other in the most panoramic intellectual endeavor in human history.

• Cornell's Legal Information Institute, with laws, court cases, and links
• The National Bureau of Economic Research famously tracks the economy.

• The U. S. Federal Government collects the facts and statistics necessary to run the government, and makes many of them available to the public -- some of the more interesting ones via the government's own FedStats site. Particulary important agencies include:
  • the Congressional Budget Office conducts "nonpartisan analysis for the U. S. Congress,"
  • the Federal Elections Commission administers and enforces federal election laws,
  • the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studies, monitors, and occasionally nags us about mortality and morbidity,
  • the Government Accountability Office watches the rest of the government, and the National Park Service has information on events surrounding national parks, which encompass much of our history, and
  • the GovTrack.us site tracks the activities of Congress and its creatures,
  • the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) (within the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB)) reviews and tracks federal regulations.
  • Official bodies with controversial missions like the Department of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
  • The United Nations Organization collects information for its members and for non-governmental organizations, as well as carry out major missions. Particular important agencies include the High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), International Labor Organization (ILO), Children's Fund (UNICEF), and the World Health Organization (WHO). Some agencies have become controversial because of alleged partiality to cliques within the U. N., most notably the Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and the High Commission on Human Rights; United Nations Human Rights Council is often regarded as an exercise in cynicism.
  And of course, this is what the Library of Congress is for, although there is also lots of stuff in the Federal Archives. The Library of Congress also runs a read.gov program to encourage people to read books.

See also the facts and trends monitored by the Pew Research Center and Public agenda.

One field where reliable facts are needed -- and often in demand -- is business. Hence business authorities like Moody's, Fitch Ratings, and Standard & Poor. Education also needs sources.

• The Delta Cost Project tracks higher education tuition and fees.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was allegedly the last person who understood all of (European) science; nowadays, science and the arts are so vast and complex, with so many practitioners, that whole organizations are dedicated to keeping up with the flood.

• The two top science publications in the world are Science (published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science) and Nature. Other leading publications include Cell, the medical journal Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
• "Learned societies" are also major authorities in themselves, or sources of authority. Leading societies include invitation-only organizations like the French Academy of Science, and the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society. Other societies accept all (qualified) applicants, like the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
• More specialized societies include the American Mathematical Society, the Mathematical Association of America, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics; the American Physical Society; the American Chemical Society; the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; the American Society of Civil Engineers; and the American Meteorological Society.
• More ad hoc groups include Social Science Space (a forum for social scientists maintained by SAGE publications).
• Leading popular science and technology magazines include Discover, the National Geographic, Natural History, Popular Mechanics, the Scientific American, the Smithsonian, Science news, and Wired. And see the PBS site for Nova.

And modern medicine has a shamanesque authority, as reflected by organizations like the American Dental Association, the American Medical Association , and the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The arts do not have the same kind of mystique, nor the same kind of money, although they do have an Establishment:

• There are tiny government agencies, like the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
• There are organizations, like the Modern Language Association, the National Music Council, and publications like ARTNews.
• And stages and forums like Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art.

• The inability of most Americans to get Al Jazeera on their cable networks is a sign that the alleged left-wing conspiracy is fairly toothless. Meanwhile, In Israel, The Jerusalem Post is popular at home (in Israel) while Haaretz is popular abroad, but the recent rise of the tribalist Israel Hayom is evidence of hardening Israeli attitudes. And an experiment in what we might call academic journalism is the Arab Studies Institute's Jadaliyya, which covers the Middle East for an American audience.
• Probably the most widely used news source in the world is the venerable British Broadcasting Company.
• To the north is the Canadian Broadcasting Company.
• Major British newspapers include the conservative Daily Mail, the businesslike Financial Times, the liberal Independent, the Sun (big tits on page 3) (what else do you need to know?), the conservative Times (of London) and the Sunday Times were purchased -- some would use a more graphic word -- by Australian mountebank Rupert Murdoch (the shock! the horror!), and the progressive U. K. Independent.
• Major European continental sources include France's Le Figaro, (the 'diplomatic' version of) Le Monde, Germany's Der Spiegel, and the Vatican City's L'Osservatore Romano.
• The Times of India has the largest circulation of any English language newspaper in the world.
• The largest newspapers in Japan are the conservative Yomiuri Shimbun and the liberal Asahi Shimbun.
• The Voice of America is your taxpayer dollars at work.
• Xinhua is the official news agency of China.