Or look how NPR, which has to fill as much time as round-the-clock cable, chooses to do factual reporting and reasoned analysis of what this election will mean to listeners. The result: NPR stations have hit record ratings highs this year, attracting a weekly audience of more than 36 million, numbers the most ratings-hungry television executive would envy.

Millions of millennials flock daily to long-form reports on the environment, civil rights and income inequality from Vice; they watch Snapchat’s inventive hit-and-run political series, “Good Luck America”; and they revel in John Oliver’s 20-minute dissections of single subjects on HBO.

The divide between the mainstream media and the public is growing, despite the ratings. Two decades ago, Thomas Patterson’s seminal study of presidential campaign coverage, “Out of Order,” argued that the press viewed politics primarily as a game, while the public viewed politics “primarily as a means of choosing leaders and solving their problems.” On Sunday, the Republican pollster Frank Luntz told “60 Minutes” that voters on both sides dismiss mainstream media, “for your focus on entertainment, for this battle for ratings and profitability rather than information and knowledge.”

If networks are to thrive in the long term, padlock the Spin Room. Instead of showcasing P.R. mouthpieces, how about featuring policy surrogates, the wonks who churn out the position papers that become laws? Want to fill time? Instead of reducing the candidates’ speeches to sound bites, then endlessly dissecting them, why not just let them talk? The debates do this, to spectacular results.

And instead of wasting reporters on summarizing the candidates’ wild assertions, how about dispatching them to break news of their own?

The networks urgently need to close the credibility gap, not only to counter the threat to their business models, but also to stem the corrosive effect on our democracy. Polls, including a recent New York Times/CBS News survey, reveal public disgust with the democratic process to be at a record high. And the Pew Research Center reports that an astonishing 81 percent of voters believe that supporters of both candidates disagree not only on the opponent’s positions, but also on the basic facts underlying those policies. When the public can’t even agree on what is true, the people in the facts business are failing.