Deep down within the “fake news” bowels of our collective dotard-nado, many disoriented Americans finally appear to be at their nose levels in the swirling sludge of misinformation masking public corruption. Something really stinks, they realize, and maybe it isn’t the journalists.

In a long-overdue swapping of perceptions, journalists actually are gaining trust within American culture again, according to a recent Reuters-Ipsos poll. This is a newsworthy 9 percent bump in positive public opinion under an administration that routinely demonizes reporters as an “enemy of the people.”

With this newfound momentum, professional journalists immediately should scramble for high moral ground and fervidly plant their flags out in the open, for everyone to see and fully inspect.

Embodying the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics, or similar codes of conduct, they should proudly, explicitly and excitedly proclaim what separates their work from the pretenders.

This is a high-stakes competition for public attention, and most of the news organizations in Hawaii seem to need to take that threat from outside sources more seriously. Distinguishing factors for journalists are truth, integrity and accountability, achieved through transparency.

Journalism is never going to be as entertaining as media designed specifically as entertainment. It’s not an intellectual commodity, like cocktail party chatter. It’s also never going to be as blandly palatable as the churned-out media products of public relations firms.

Good journalism always is some form of investigative journalism, regardless of the genre or topic. Journalists investigate and bring to light questions of public concern, then try to hash them out, often raising uncomfortable ideas. They follow well-established protocols and procedures that separate them from hacks, cranks and neighborhood busybodies.

Fake news taunts, in general, have done their damage to journalism as an industry because much of what those criticisms prey upon is a legitimate lack of candidness from journalists about what journalists do and how they do it. By disguising or masking their processes, while demanding openness from everyone else, journalists harm themselves with perceptions of hypocrisy.

After decades of complacency and crass profiteering, the journalism industry now has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reposition itself, amid a zombie army of impersonators.

Since fake news stories most often are designed with sinister intent (to hoax, prank or purposely mislead the gullible public), and since fake news sites often are visual mimics of real news sites, real journalists need to separate themselves in clearer and more significant ways.

I often comment in this column about story-level issues, in terms of particular problems with particular pieces. But I’ve started to also think of these issues more systematically. In short, most news sites in Hawaii don’t publicly state their editorial standards, so therefore, they never are able to reach them (or publicly violate them, even if they do disregard broader industry practices).

With the versatile what-aboutism argument, ethics offenders always can point to some other news organization somewhere that also did the same thing at some point, making it therefore OK. But that con game has played out poorly for legitimate news organizations, lowering the ethical bar to below-basement Breitbart levels.

With the public perception tide appearing to turn in favor of real journalists, I recommend starting this new era of growing appreciation with public proclamations of our foundational beliefs and practices, raising that bar well above the fakers, and helping people determine what information can be trusted.

The SPJ Code covers much of the basics, and Civil Beat states on its web site that the code is its core, with additional alignment in practices with the Associated Press. It also has more in-depth policies shared about anonymous sources and corrections.

Importantly, Civil Beat also shows who specifically the reporters are, what credentials they have, such as industry awards, and who their patrons are, so readers can check the list for conflicts of interest.

Civil Beat’s site does not, though, showcase all of these standards well. A web design flaw, for example, allows the user to hover over the “About Us” section drop-down menu, without indicating that the top-level label also is clickable and only in that spot (it’s not on the list otherwise). That clickable label is where the SPJ, AP and other policies can be found, but they also are presented within a long block of text, in the fifth of six paragraphs of description about the organization, rather than given their own place.

These are details that deserve their own label under “About Us.”

Hawaii Public Radio lists its people, organizational accolades and even a helpful narrative about what it does and tries to do. Maybe every news organization should create a document like that each year, as a formal report to the community?

The biggest media organization in the state, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, though, has a bizarre and antiquated web design, with no clear presentation of its operating procedures and protocols, beyond the faint hope offered by a small About Us link at the bottom of the home page. That, however, leads to a reprint of an article about the history of the paper.

Contact Information at the Star-Advertiser leads to a list of names and numbers of directors and managers, and individual stories have email hyperlinks to the reporters. The Star-Advertiser writes regularly about ethical issues. Yet I failed to find any sort of code of conduct or public policies for Oahu Publications on the site or even a list of reporters and their beats (as in who covers what). If it’s there, it’s certainly not easy to find.

The local television news stations have a similar opaqueness to them. While they each list their on-air talent and their news credentials in short bios (KITV, KHON, HNN) and cover ethical issues (KITV, KHON, HNN), they do not have any specific sections of the web sites (at least that I can find) explaining how they do their journalism in this community. KITV, for example, has a thin About Us section that provides a link to frequently asked questions. Nothing there about conduct and protocols, though, which leads me to wonder if viewers frequently don’t ask process-related questions, or if those simply aren’t addressed anywhere on this site.

While these sites might not be explicitly trying to hide anything about their news-gathering processes, they also are missing a major opportunity to differentiate themselves from everybody else trying to take away their viewers. Why not show the audience how hard this work is, if you do it right; how thoughtful journalists are, regularly debating among themselves the nuances of their stories; and how generally high a person’s integrity has to be to survive long-term as a journalist. Unethical journalists typically don’t last long.

After decades of complacency and crass profiteering, the journalism industry now has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reposition itself, amid a zombie army of impersonators. The stories they present can speak for themselves, in terms of their qualities. But I think news sites need something more as well, a way to show off their organizational principles, to be more transparent, as a way to emerge from the media noise.

People are coming back now, to look at what journalists have to offer. What we show them about how we work and what we do will help to determine how long they stick around.