I raised some eyebrows a few years ago when I said in a speech that almost every newspaper in America employs a plagiarist or two. I meant that the definition of plagiarism usually is so fuzzy in newsrooms and the enforcement of standards so haphazard that many people plagiarize even if they don’t call it that.

I was wrong.

I should have said that ethical problems in general, including but not limited to plagiarism, exist in almost every newsroom, print or broadcast or Web. One of the ironies is that journalists today are telling readers and listeners that ethical standards never have been higher, thanks in part to the scandals of the past few years.

In two days last week, two of the best reporters in America were accused of violating the most basic standards of their business. Unfortunately, most consumers won’t have any idea that they still need to be alert to media ethics because most outlets won’t report these incidents, thinking they’re “inside baseball.”

In one amazing case, the New York Times revealed that a former reporter, Kurt Eichenwald, had paid $2,000 to an 18-year-old child-porn star, part of a 2005 investigation of Web sex sites. The motives were to help him and also to learn his real identity, Eichenwald told the Associated Press. (The money later was repaid.)  Eichenwald violated two rules: You don’t pay for news. You don’t get far too close to your source.

In the second case, Pulitzer Prize-winner Tom Hallman Jr. of the Oregonian in Portland accepted a regular downtown parking space from someone he had profiled. Later, the subject of the profile “pleaded guilty to filing a false tax return and paying an illegal gratuity, charges stemming from an investigation into the largest pension-fund fraud in U.S. history,” Willamette Week reported. Easy call: You don’t accept gifts from someone you’ve covered, whether or not he’s a con.

If blatant ethical lapses permeate the top ranks of American journalism, is the situation hopeless? No, but it’s way past time to inspire some hope. If there were a Reader Bill of Rights (now there’s an idea), readers could expect the media to:

– Blow the whistle on themselves and publicize their own lapses.

– Publicize the lapses of others, too. All media consumers deserve to know about the New York and Portland cases and others like them.

– Talk to their employees, and readers, about ethics year-round, not just once in 20 years when an organization adopts an ethics code. (Full disclosure: I occasionally trade ethics training for food.) As a top editor and then a corporate officer, I had to sign an ethics code annually. That at least required me to flip through the code once a year.

Those low expectations might start the battle to win the trust of consumers. At the very least, they’d remind readers as well as journalists that you don’t give sources money or take gifts from them.

A version of this article appeared in the San Jose Mercury News.