Trust in American mass media has dropped to an all-time low, fueled by a fascist alignment of corporate and political scoundrels turned active enemies of the First Amendment.

“Liberals” meanwhile degrade constitutional rights, too, when they suppress speech, even jokes, especially on college campuses, as parapets around intellectual curiosity crumble just about everywhere.

Partisanship in the press has been profitable for many, but it also has given rise to massive factories of cynicism, disillusionment and misinformation. Their smog sullens or extinguishes many potentially fruitful forms of civic communities and civil discourse, including the innovation of reader comments at the end of news stories.

This Reader Rep column, like other “public editor” efforts, aims to offer a partial antidote. It attempts to bring everyone back together into a common forum, where nonjudgemental and dialectical discussions can take place around timely media issues. Yet public editors, like journalists in general, have been casualties of the collapse of the newspaper business model.

One extant ombudsmen, Elizabeth Jensen, of National Public Radio, will give a free presentation Monday at 5 p.m. at the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii in Honolulu, about rebuilding public trust in the media. If we within media organizations don’t regain such trust, as part of restoring the ethos of the journalistic ideology, she contends, we can’t reestablish critical foundations of our democracy that have been diminished or destroyed during the past two decades.

(If you’re interested in attending the event, which is sponsored by the East-West Center and Hawaii Public Radio, please call the East-West Center at 944-7111 to see if seats are available and to RSVP. Civil Beat will also livestream the event on Facebook.)

Reached by phone in advance of her visit, Jensen said she traces the decline in public trust of mass media to the disengagement from (and eventual elimination of) the Fairness Doctrine, which required opposing viewpoints to be represented fairly on broadcast media channels. This regulatory shift led to the proliferation of political talk radio in the late 1980s and early 1990s, followed by the founding of Fox News in the mid-1990s.

“This has been decades in the making,” she added. “Media is not the only institution in which people have lost trust during this time period. There has been declining attendance in churches, for example, so this is a societal-wide movement.”

In response, she said, a lot of people have been retreating to their ideological corners, building up systems against – and a resistance to – competing ideas.

How do we coax people back out of their corners, and get them to talk together again, in a civil manner? Jensen said she sees no short-term, magic-bullet solution.

Several journalistic organizations are working on initiatives to help. Jensen has been watching the Trust Project at Santa Clara University, for example, as it develops ideas about journalistic transparency and indicators of trust that can be communicated better to audiences. Those include easily accessible editorial guidelines, company ownership and funding sources; corrections policy and practices; an ethics policy, and, an ombudsman (or public editor).

Civil Beat writes regularly about its practices and covers many of these basic “trust” items well, but the site would benefit from this core information being more transparent and easily accessible. One easy solution is to link all of that into the About Us section, rather than requiring extensive ad-hoc searching of the site to find it. The About Us category, right now, contains sections about “Our Awards,” “Member Benefits” and “Our Supporters” but not a direct link to many of the fundamental news-gathering policies.

I also recommend labeling such information in more action-oriented ways, from the reader’s point of view, such as providing a link for “How do I request a correction,” “How do I report an ethical violation,” “How do I reach the ombudsman,” etc., and “Read our mission statement,” “Read our ethics policy,” “Read our diversity policy,” etc.

By focusing on local and state news, Civil Beat also builds trust with readers by proficiently covering proximate issues that the audience can independently question, challenge or corroborate.

Much of the distrust in media, Jensen said, is generated on the national level, about politics. Many people separate in their minds national news from local news, much like they tend to distrust Congress in general but also stand by their own representative.

Jensen envisions her role of ombudsman at the intersection of journalists and their audiences. She represents NPR’s listeners and takes their concerns to the newsroom, she said, while then bringing the newsroom’s views back to the audience.

Instead of being the front line for corrections, or newsroom discipline, Jensen said she sees her role as one to illuminate expansive journalistic issues, through examples raised by listeners.

“Part of my job is to aggregate,” she said, “then address a broader challenge.”

An example she raised was how NPR handles live interviews.

“Some facts get by the host, and not every host can know every piece of information,” she said. “People interviewed make misstatements, misstate facts, revert to talking points, and so on, and it’s a challenge to figure out ways to handle that.”

“For the most part, (NPR) won’t do on-air corrections and won’t update facts. … What can you do about it other than to cut back or stop doing live interviews?”

Ombudsmen often deal with similarly complicated journalistic issues, as when The New York Times public editor, Liz Spayd, dipped into the fracas about climate change-denying columnist Bret Stephens. Stephens was supposed to bring “diversity” to the opinion columns of the media organization, if diversity includes in its umbrella overreaching devil’s advocacy about well-established science.

Instead of bringing together the readership community, Spayd’s column ignited another round of fury, featuring a social-media protest and canceled subscriptions.

Recently retired Public Broadcasting Corporation ombudsman, Michael Getler, noted in his final column how few ombudsmen even exist anymore in mass media, from the high point in the mid-1980s, when more than 40 American newspapers had them, to today’s group. That list consisted of a couple of large publications, a couple in national broadcasting and a smattering of others, like me, around the country at smaller organizations.

“In today’s frequently poisonous and ideological online environment,” he wrote, “ombudsmen or public editors also, not infrequently, need to defend news organizations from unfair, self-interested, or inaccurate criticism.”

As for her place between listeners and the newsroom, and in building trust back into the system, Jensen said, “We don’t always agree on everything. But we’re all on the same side. We’re all trying to make sure journalism stays strong.”