This paper is based on the results of a questionnaire survey targeted at journalists in Beijing, as well as the survey data obtained from the field trip to media and enterprises in Yunnan Province and Shandong Province. The paper suggests that the occupational status of journalists in China has dropped significantly at present. There are a variety of reasons for the decline in status, and one of them is the depreciation of journalists’ self-identification along with the mismatch in social-identification. The self-identification of journalists has seen a drop from “uncrowned kings” to “news labor”, and the social-identification of journalist is always entangled and compromised among several characters, including “public opinion supervisors”, “objective recorders”, “propagators” and “participants in social construction”. Journalists tend to position themselves as “public opinion supervisors” and “objective recorders”, while officials tend to position them as “propagators”, and some entrepreneurs and the public tend to position them as “participants in social construction”. The latter two positions of journalist are seriously mismatched with the self-identification of journalists. This mismatch results in a series of problems such as the loss of journalists’ professional sacredness and the decline in professional ethics, and these problems in turn accelerate the drop of the occupational status of journalists, which sets up a vicious cycle.