The famous early newspaperman James Gordon Bennett, the editor of The New York Herald and one of the founders of that first popular medium the penny press, back in 1836 at the start of the age of mass communication, described the role of newspapers as he saw it:

I suggest that the practitioners in any institution so central and so powerful as to supplant churches, schools, books, and the theater, and to take the lead in all these great movements of human thought and civilization, are part of a high calling, a demanding profession--whether they know it or not, whether their institution admits it or not.

It is true that the journalist is a different sort of "professional" in a different sort of institution from the doctor or lawyer. In traditional theory, if not in much of current practice, doctors and lawyers are independent professionals, making moral choices of great importance on their own--holding in their hands, often literally, the life and well being of another. Modern journalism, on the other hand, is a collective enterprise, with wire services, assignment desks, city editors, editorial conferences, make-up desks, advertisers, owners of chains, enormous pressures of time and space, and commercial breaks for words from our sponsor. The modern journalist is not an independent agent, although he may once long ago have been so, when he himself owned and printed and reported his own little Bootstrap Bugle. He or she is now a hired employee of a profit-seeking business: WISH-TV, The Washington Post, The Bloomington Herald Telephone, CBS News, Time Magazine, The Laramie Republican-Boomerang, The Associated Press, Hearst's Journal American, The Des Moines Register. He is hired, fired, promoted, demoted, assigned, edited, by the national desk, the front office, the tenth floor, the executive editor, the owner. Although an individual in his niche may make decisions of importance he makes them within the boundaries, and under the impetus, of that collectivity. Peter Arnett made many very important decisions about his reporting from Baghdad under Saddam Hussein's thumb during the Gulf War; but CNN in Atlanta made the fundamental decision to keep him there, to carry his reports, and to surround them with disclaimers.

And although the stream of publicity to which an individual reporter or editor makes his contribution can cause both harm and good to individuals--a recurrent issue in the journalism ethics texts--the larger issues about the effects of that publicity are more diffuse, remote, and collective. For a journalist the moral shape of the situation is collective on both sides: news organization/public instead of independent professional/client. The reader/viewer/citizen/member of the public for whom the newsperson's work is done is not the same as the patient/client for whom the doctor's or lawyer's work is done. Journalists do not have a special obligation-creating bond with a particular human being: this is my patient, this is my client. (This is my source is obviously a different relationship.) When a journalist says to himself, like Kierkegaard only differently, you are that One, my reader, he says it, having hoped for a larger circulation, in despair. In fact if a journalist has a client--the Governor, the local Daddy Warbucks, the Gas Company, or the Citizens Against Outer Space--then he has failed to meet a prime responsibility of his profession. First among those responsibilities is exactly to reject such antecedent and particularized obligations on his mind and his powers of observation and interpretation. His obligations, as he rightly says--although he often does not put it in terms of obligation--are exactly and almost uniquely to the whole public.