Two-and-a-half cheers for traditional, “legacy” news media this election.

Sure, everyone hates us. As the interwebs (and this newspaper’s owner) keep reminding me, trust in news organizations has reached all-time lows. When a major party’s presidential candidate muses about having reporters locked up or murdered, crowds cheer. Meanwhile, our audiences have been siphoned off by upstart news brands or social media.

And Lord knows we (myself included) have made our share of mistakes.

But you know what? If you had consumed all your election news this year exclusively from The Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal or other journalistic dinosaurs, you’d probably be well-informed. You’d have a sense of what the stakes are this election. You might even know what the candidates stand for! The same cannot be said if you instead primarily relied on TikTok influencers, random bros with podcasts or Discord streams, and Elon Musk’s X platform.

For all our faults, traditional journalists have still managed to unearth and explain what the candidates stand for and how their agendas would affect regular Americans. Readers often claim the media “won’t cover” some critical issue or other, but such kibitzers probably know about the story in question only because some hardworking journalist excavated it.

If you know that Donald Trump’s Justice Department blocked an investigation into whether he received $10 million from the Egyptian president, you know it because of The Post. If you’ve heard that Trump’s former chief of staff described him as fascist, you heard it because of the New York Times. If you learned that Musk, a major Trump adviser and U.S. government contractor, has had secret conversations with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, you learned it because of the Wall Street Journal.

These are old institutions, each more than a century old. But quite a few younger news organizations have adopted a similar spirit to the legacy brands and practice the same kind of traditional shoe-leather reporting, with traditional journalistic standards and ethics. Consider ProPublica, a not-for-profit national news organization that published must-read, sensitive stories about pregnant women in Georgia and Texas who died after being denied emergency abortion care. And countless smaller newspapers, with fewer resources, are doing yeoman’s work to hold local officials to account.

We traditional journalists don’t get things right all the time. We have biases we’re often blind to. We make errors of omission, commission and emphasis. But we are (usually) embarrassed when we get stuff wrong, and we have procedures for transparently correcting our mistakes.

Ironically, this might partly be why the public doesn’t trust us: We admit our mistakes, rather than doubling down and pretending to omniscience — as the Trumps and Musks of the world do.

Admission of error, or even of uncertainty, should make the public trust us more. But perversely, it often makes people trust us less. (Just watch what happens on the rare occasion when a public official issues a mea culpa.) Audiences often mistake certainty for credibility and confuse confidence with competence. As a longtime cable news pundit, I learned long ago that the fastest way to lose audience trust is to say “I don’t know.”

And, so, a disillusioned public seeks out new information sources that claim to be unblemished by error, doubt or political allegiance. Unfortunately, plenty of alternative news sources falsely present themselves this way, while disseminating honest mistakes at best and deliberate misinformation at worst.

Some do so for financial remuneration (to build and monetize an audience). Some do it for political gain (to win an election, to score a Cabinet post, to destabilize a rival country). Yet others might just be useful idiots manipulated by the first two groups. Whatever the motivation, these “alternative” sources of information build up their perceived credibility by smearing ours. They claim they have a monopoly on truth, which those of us in mainstream media organizations have allegedly been withholding.

This is how Americans end up listening to cranks and conspiracy theorists who falsely claim that fluoridation causes cancer, or that undocumented Haitian immigrants are illegally voting, or that emergency responders have abandoned hurricane victims to floods and homelessness.

The caveats to all this: As a journalist employed by one of those dinosaurs, I obviously have a vested interest in making all these arguments. And I don’t know what the solution is, other than teaching Americans to become more discerning consumers of news and other information, and to work harder as journalists to prove we’re careful, thorough and fair.

We’ve lost audience trust, and within the industry there are fierce debates about how to regain it. That’s true even within this very newspaper, where we have had significant disagreement about how to best demonstrate our political independence.

But in the meantime, I want to recognize my colleagues in traditional media who subject themselves to danger, exhaustion, harassment and instability just to do their jobs. You are my heroes. This election cycle, I’m a better-informed voter because of you.

Email: crampell@washpost.com.