BARI WEISS: The Washington Post’s Descent Into Middle School Antics: And why we’re building something new.

So let’s get this straight: at the paper that cracked wide open the biggest presidential scandal in history, the paper that has long defined great political reporting, the paper of Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee and David Broder, journalists lie and publicly attack their colleagues and remain comfortably in their positions. And a reporter is suspended without pay for a retweet. . . .

It’s not that the excellent, old-school reporters aren’t there. They are. They just don’t—or can’t—control the culture.

Partly that’s because of weakness and cowardice at the top of the masthead. Partly it’s because you can pretty much guarantee the kind of worldview you’re going to get when you hire journalists pedigreed by Harvard and Brown and Yale. They tend to think almost exactly the same way about almost every situation—and Twitter only reinforces the groupthink.

So whether the staffers and editors at places like the Times and the Post ignored the riots of summer 2020 while genuflecting to the lunatic idea that op-eds are violence because they were true believers in the new dogma or because they were careerists or because they were just plain scared only meant that some of them broke your heart more than others.

All our institutions have been corrupted. Some of them put up some resistance. Others didn’t. Plus:

What there’s too little of—and here is the second unignorable problem—is trust.

A huge and growing audience of Americans no longer believes the stories the establishment media tells. This has been building for years, decades maybe, and now that skepticism, that irritation with the “liberal press,” has morphed into a gag reflex: tens of millions of readers and watchers who once took for granted that you could more or less depend on The Times or CBS or even CNN to report the facts, to give it to you straight, don’t think that anymore. Their breaking points were different—maybe it was dismissing the Trump phenomenon as a joke; or calling the lab leak theory misinformation; or maybe it was seeing reporters act like mean girls on social media. The upshot is that they are out of trust.

This loss is nothing to celebrate. I would love to live in a world where I trusted what I read in the paper.

Maybe you never could.