Bit surprised with your last paragraph, I don't think the fourth estate is like any other business sector at all. For a number of reasons too, the rather obvious one being the transaction between buyer, producer and manufacturer being unlike in any other branch of trade.
It is and it isn't.
Journalistic enterprises are similar to other businesses in that they're profit-making entities - although often in a complex with other, related business interests.
Murdoch for example famously accepts loss-making broadsheets among his assets because they do the job of ideological production that supports his political connections, and thereby opens the way for his much more profitable enterprises, like subscription television services.
My point was to steer away from a narrow view of common purpose between news outlets and state power, when actually, the news media peddle influence and ideology to their own advantage and have at best an uneasy relationship with the state.
So of the Guardian, for example, you can say it's compromised by its willingness to submit to pressure from an agency like MI6, but you can't reasonably claim it's a "willing servant" of MI6.
"Proximity to power" is in many cases a tentative relationship in which journalists, as individuals, are unwilling to kill the goose that lays their golden eggs. Many high profile political commentators live and die by the strategic leaks they receive and republish from their contacts in particular political factions or parties, or in the bureaucracy.
With each damaging leak they're weighing how to frame the reputational damage in a way that will keep information flowing to them in future. Consciously or unconsciously, they end up in relationships that would seem fraudulent to a member of the public interested in the truth.
