Here's the step forward: Yesterday's China Daily headline: "New three-tier information plan eases news flow". Huh?

The article contains a lot of waffle from Minister Zhao Qizheng of the State Council Information Office, but also a few interesting titbits:

"[Zhao] called on government information officers to treat journalists "decently". Officials do not have the right to consider "journalists your subordinates, students, friends or enemies," he said. "They are your challengers -- like your challenger in a tennis game."

Journalists tend to raise pointed questions because that's what their profession is supposed to do, the minister stressed.

Domestic media "have been playing an increasingly big role in `supervising' the work of the government in the last few years," Zhao observed in encouragement.

Apropos of which, here is a little something about the Fourth Estate:

The term fourth estate is frequently attributed to the nineteenth century historian Carlyle, though he himself seems to have attributed it to Edmund Burke:

"Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact, ... Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. ... Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures: the requisite thing is that he have a tongue which others will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite." -- Carlyle (1905)