Media professionalism evolved historically as a response to the rise of market economy in the United States, thus emphasizing the separation of facts from values to maximize the audience. It also embodies the democratic reform impulse, traceable to the “enduring values” of the Progressive Movement. Media professionalism, at a low ebb, is undergoing difficult transition in the West. Radical critique of media professionalism may be of progressive implications in the West. However, it is nothing but a “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” if such critique is exported uncritically to deprive media professionalism of its raison d’etre in societies where media professionalism does not exist.