It's an implicit contract. The Constitution protects them with the assumption they will hold governments accountable with honest reporting. Now that they don't, that deal needs to END.
Jefferson hated the press for being biased yet wanted them to have the freedom they have.
Memo to Donald Trump: Thomas Jefferson invented hating the media
During his time as U.S. minister to France, Thomas Jefferson penned a letter to a statesman from Virginia, waxing poetic about the importance of a free press.
“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right,”
Jefferson wrote to Edward Carrington in 1787. “And were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”
Those words would help identify the Founding Father as a champion of the press.
But as Jefferson was writing them, scholars say, he did not foresee that newspapers would become a partisan tool for warring political factions in a climate of unrest and uncertainty over the fate of a nascent nation.
By the time he was approaching his presidency, anxieties were high and newspapers had taken a critical stance. Jefferson in turn had taken critical tone with them, at least in his in personal letters, in which he often excoriated the press — much as the 45th president, Donald Trump, would do more than 200 years later.
Trump says ‘I inherited a mess,’ blasts media and detractors at combative news conference
“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper,” Jefferson said then.
“FAKE NEWS media … makes up stories and 'sources,'”
Trump tweets now.
There is no implied contract, you are fooling yerself.