Kansas City, Mo. ? The nation’s media is under assault from internal and external forces and must evolve in order to recapture a public that views it with increasing skepticism, according to Gerald Boyd, who resigned as managing editor of The New York Times after the Jayson Blair scandal.

Boyd, speaking Friday at a Media and Law seminar in Kansas City, said the media’s growing credibility gap with the public and a lack of internal structures to catch “a determined bad apple” were at the center of recent scandals involving Blair and other reporters who were fired or resigned after plagiarizing or fabricating stories.

He said Blair’s fabrications went undetected in part because the paper’s management was “managing the wrong problem.” He said the Times thought it was managing a young, erratic reporter with a lot of potential. Instead, he said, “we were managing a reporter who did not share the values that we all shared as journalists.”

Boyd also said the public perception of the media has become increasingly negative, partly because of the glut of information sources with varying standards and values.

“I know that is what the public sees, hears and read,” Boyd said. “It does not give them an incentive to trust us. It makes them unwilling to point out flaws. ‘That’s just the way it is,’ they believe.”

He also cited polls that show the American public increasingly believes that mainstream newspapers are not believable, have a political bias, get their facts wrong and try to cover up mistakes.

Boyd said two steps were fundamental to the future of journalism: spending more time, money and effort grooming future leaders and working harder to help the public understand that the media works for them.

“We cannot take the view that we can put it out their for them to take it as we give it,” Boyd said. “In all honesty, fewer of them are taking it.”

He said media managers must focus more on the reasons for doing a story and whether those reasons are clear to readers. And he said structures that answer those questions must be practiced not just in journalism education and seminars but in daily journalism.

“I don’t pretend to have all the answers. I don’t even pretend to know all the questions,” Boyd said. “But I know that truth matters. It is our currency, it is the foundation of our profession.”