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Sounds like the “journalists” think they are in charge.

Well, they would. Journalists all have similar incentives, and the AP “wire” - and wire services generally - constitute virtual meetings which have dominated journalism since before the Civil War. Consequently journalists’ behavior is just what Adam Smith predicted when he wrote that
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
And what is journalism’s incentive?
The desire of being believed, the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires. — Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments
The journalism cartel’s “conspiracy against the public” lies in its propaganda campaign to the effect that "journalists are objective.” This claim is inherently wrong, in that objectivity is a (laudable) goal but not a state of being. Consequently “journalists are objective” is actually a demand that all journalists go along and get along with the journalism cartel ideologically (it is only by breaking from journalism’s consensus that a journalist is in danger of being drummed out of the profession as “not objective, not a journalist).
Thus, just as “liberal” (as well as “progressive” and “moderate” and centrist”) means in the mouth of a journalist “in conformity with journalism’s orthodoxy and thus qualified to be a journalist,” “objective” means exactly the same thing but only (and always) is applied to actual working journalists.
All Democrats now are “liberals” - and the difference between “liberals” and “objective journalists” is simply the fact of journalists’ employment and the fact that the appellation “objective” rather than “liberal" is systematically applied to working journalists.