Power
With great power comes great responsibility. At least, that's how it used to be back in the good ol' days of journalism.
Whether you did a story on a catfight at the most recent school board meeting or an interagency snafu in Washington, D.C., your duty as a member of the press was to gather information, distill it into its purest form, and convey it in a succinct, interesting, and truthful manner to others. This made you, as a journalist, enormously powerful.
You didn't tell people how to vote, but the stories you reported influenced how voters viewed candidates. You didn't tell people what to buy, but the articles you wrote convinced neurotic mothers not to let their kids drink from plastic water bottles.
Of course, journalism today is very different from what it was twenty years ago. How can you be powerful as a news reporter if you can't get a job as a news reporter, or keep the job in news you have, or know if the newspaper or station you work for will even exist in a month's time?