Bret Stephens: How to destroy what’s left of mainstream media’s credibility — set aside objectivity

It is hardly a secret within America’s newsrooms that our profession has lost much of the public’s trust. Gallup, which has polled “Confidence in Institutions” for decades, found that, as of last summer, just 16% of Americans had either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers — down from 25% a decade earlier and 35% in 2002. For TV news, the latest results were even worse. Only 11% of Americans trust it; 53% don’t. Most of us, in or out of the news media, would surely agree that this is a bad thing. We were a saner country when we could argue from a common set of uncontested facts. But we have a harder time agreeing on why trust in media collapsed and, more crucially, on how it can be restored.