Popular Culture
- In The Simpsons episode "Sideshow Bob Roberts" (originally aired October 9, 1994), Springfield's leading conservative talk radio host, Birch Barlow (a parody of leading American conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh) welcomes listeners to his show by introducing himself as the "fourth branch of government" and the "51st state."
- In 2007, the short-lived ABC drama-thriller Traveler, the fourth branch existed as a secret society created by the Founding Fathers and composed of the oldest families in the United States, whose purpose is to implement checks and balances on the U.S. government to guide the true course of America.
- Rapper and political activist Immortal Technique has a track entitled the "4th branch," in which he applies the role of said branch to the media in a pejorative manner. He implies in this track (or pretty much explicitly states) that the US media of the time acts more like another part of the government instead of its own independent entity, and he gives some of his reasons for this belief on the track.
- "4th Branch" is also the name of a record label - 4th Branch Records, owned by DJ Prezzident, based in Columbia, Missouri.
Read more about this topic: Fourth Branch Of Government
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination.... After the racist statutes are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long.”
—Michael Harrington (1928–1989)