The aim of news gathering is to advance the party. Here journalism is a secondary or subsidiary institution deferring to the party rather than a wholly autonomous business enterprise. There are eth nic and community newspapers, magazines of opinion, and hundreds of newsletters that operate in an advocacy mode. But this is rare today for the general circulation press. By the time the mass political party emerged in the Jacksonian era, party newspapers were well established as the central agents of party organizing and party propaganda.
Journalists ordinarily accept the trustee model as the only alternative to market-driven journalism.
In this model, journalists imagine a public that is often too preoccupied and too distracted to be sovereign of its own citizenship. Citizens then entrust a measure of sovereignty to journalists just as people entrust a measure of control over thei r bodies to doctors. Trustee model journalism established its commitment to reporting over commentary in the late 19th century and its commitment to an ideology of objectivity, to professional codes of ethics, and to principles of disinterested public service by the 19 20s. These views reached some kind of zenith in the 1950s and 1960s. They came to a curious climax with the reporting of Vietnam and Watergate.