A mismatched couple ...

... and more: Siskel and Ebert and goodbye to all that.

"... when there are no standards, however imperfectly applied those standards might be, then there is no trust."

But polls routinely indicate that the mainstream media has largely lost the public's trust, probably because of "all its tendentiousness, manipulativeness, arrogance, and inability to accept stray facts that don’t fit into its preconceived notions of a story." There's no mystery to winning trust: Be honest and trustworthy, look at things from as many angles as possible, try to get at the facts of the matter, and don't try to fit them into a preconceived narrative. If you need to refer to a synthetic code of ethics, such as those newspapers like to draw up, you're probably already a moral moron.