Journalism is facing the worst crisis of its history, with trust in the media at an all-time low. To recover the public’s confidence, journalism needs to rediscover the idea of honor.

Don’t laugh. There once was a time when journalists were capable of acting with honor — that is to say, of trying to tell the truth even if it hurt their own side. Yes, it seems inconceivable in light of the new, exhaustive series in the Columbia Journalism Review detailing the media’s corruption in spreading the Russia collusion hoax, not to mention the daily lies they tell. Even as the warehouse of evidence compiled by veteran journalist Jeff Gerth shows how badly the media botched Russiagate, and despite icon Bob Woodward’s efforts to shame his Washington Post colleagues for their lack of remorse and self-reflection, no one is coming forward with any apologies. Nobody is acting with honor.

Still, there are events in journalism’s history that have always represented the profession at its best and most honorable. The first that comes to mind is Rolling Stone magazine’s coverage of the Altamont fiasco, and the second is the Stephen Glass scandal at the New Republic.

The 1970 National Magazine Award was given to Rolling Stone magazine for its coverage of the tragedy of the 1969 Altamont concert. The band the Rolling Stones had attempted to play a concert, but the event devolved into chaos and violence, resulting in four deaths. The reason the concert went south was because the Rolling Stones hired the biker gang known as the Hells Angels to provide security.

The coverage in Rolling Stone was accurate and devastatingly critical. Calling Altamont “rock & roll’s worst day,” a writer described the scene this way: “Flickering silhouettes of people trying to find warmth around the blazing track reminded one of the medieval paintings of tortured souls in the Dance of Death.”

Another journalist in the equally radical 1960s magazine Ramparts observed, “We all seemed beyond the law at Altamont, out there willingly, all 300,000 of us, Stones and Angels included, and on our own.” The citation to Rolling Stone for the National Magazine Award praised its editors for “challenging the shared assumptions of its readers.”

It’s a phrase that has stayed with me for 30 years. If your research as a journalist leads you to conclusions that contradict your own side, you have to have the integrity to report that. Even if it’s something as silly as monkeyfishing .

Another example of journalists acting with honor is the case of Stephen Glass. In 1998, New Republic writer Glass was found guilty of making up many of his pieces. Glass's lying was so blatant that even his liberal colleagues had to take action — but not until they were pushed to do so.

In its best scene, the 1998 film Shattered Glass depicts the moment when new editor Charles Lane explodes at reporter Caitlin Avey, who had been defending Glass. Lane, the one honorable person left on staff, has to jackhammer through the liberal groupthink to find Avey’s sense of honor. “He handed us fiction after fiction, and we printed them all as fact,” Lane says, “just because we found him entertaining.” Then he drops the bomb: “It’s indefensible. Don’t you know that?”

For today’s reporters, the answer to that question is no.

In one sense, to reclaim honor, we have to go back not to Stephen Glass, or to Altamont, but to the early 20th Century. In his great book Honor: A History, critic James Bowman explores how the concept of honor has changed in the last 100 years. Victorian notions of honor held that pride in country, love, defense of neighbors and wives, and telling the truth were honorable. These attributes were important not just in how your fellow citizens saw you, but in the eyes of God. Honor was connected to how you would be perceived after leaving this world.

Bowman writes that honor culture took a devastating blow during World War I, when old notions of honor were crushed by the senseless slaughter and the devastating nature of modern warfare. We continue to relive the trauma of the First World War, which is why the Netflix remake of All Quiet on the Western Front has been nominated for a bunch of Oscars. According to James Bowman, this reliving of WWI is a way to inoculate yourselves from having to consider that honor may indeed be important: ”The fact that we continue to mythologize the slaughter [of WWI] in this way suggests a continuing need to remind ourselves that our parents and grandparents were right to dishonor honor, perhaps because we fear its reinstitution into our 21st Century culture.”

Indeed. If honor were to make a comeback, it would mean that journalists would have to face themselves in the mirror. And for too many of them, their own failings are a story they don’t want to cover.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil' s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.