Ever since press freedom was announced in 1992, Ethiopian journalism has drawn the attentionrnof many researchers. Many of the studies have focused on the impact of external factors, such asrngovernment and other interest groups on the press and practice of journalism. However, therninfluence of press and journalism itself has been very rarely studied, and this study was meant tornfill this gap.rnJournalism in Ethiopia has suffered from a tug of war between state owned and private media asrnwell as within the private media; this division has made the threat to press freedom twofold. Thisrnstudy attempted to examine the cause(s) for the division by eliciting views of media owners,rndirectors, editors, journalists, journalists associations, and journalism educators; it also tried tornexamine the role of journalistic professionalism with respect to regulating and improvingrnEthiopian Journalism.rnTo this end, data were gathered through in-depth interviews from key informants, who werernpicked up purposively and whose responses were analyzed qualitatively within the theoreticalrnframework of Differentiation Theory, and Hallin and Mancini's Polarized Pluralist conceptualrnModel.rnIIrnAccordingly, the 1992 unprecedented transformation of Ethiopian media land escape from staternmonopoly to 'liberalized' and 'privatized' media system was found to be the major cause for therndivision. This being the major cause, however, the study has shown that journalisticrnprofessionalism has not yet been conceived by the media practitioners as an important instrumentrnin guarding off outsiders' pressures in general and state interference in particular.