Trust in major news outlets keeps eroding, with the core complaint being that reporters now push causes instead of reporting facts — bad for legacy outlets, and a burden on readers who have to piece the truth together themselves.

• Lee Strobel says the job of a journalist is to tell the truth and both sides, not to change the world.
• The New York Times and Washington Post have turned into advocates for a cause rather than straight news sources, in his view.
• He still pays for both — not because he trusts them, but to know what they are saying.
• The Wall Street Journal rates as the most reliable of the big outlets, with CNN and Fox News sampled against each other to find a middle.
• The workaround now is reading several outlets at once and averaging out the bias.

Outlook: Expect audiences to keep splitting across multiple sources as trust in any single outlet keeps sliding.