ABC News demonstrated again this morning why a growing number of people do not trust the veracity and accuracy of information presented by news organizations.

A member of the “roundtable” on This Week With George Stephanopolous was Donna Brazile, former acting director of the Democratic National Committee. A primary topic of discussion was this week’s testimony before the Senate by fired FBI Director James Comey. The fact that he admitted “leaking” information about his interactions with President Trump was a primary topic.

It was beyond ironic that Brazile was a member of the panel discussing “leaking.” As pointed out in the new book, “Fixing Post-Truth Politics,” which is available free through Wednesday for Kindle, Brazile has an embarrassing history of her own regarding leaks:

A leaked email showed that Democratic National Committee boss and former CNN contributor Donna Brazile shared a debate question in advance with the Hillary Clinton campaign — despite Brazile’s persistent claims to the contrary. Brazile was on leave from her position with the Democratic National Committee and working with CNN when this occurred. While it is very unlikely that CNN news leaders knew Brazile would share information with her party’s candidate, it certainly calls into question their judgment to allow Brazile access to debate subject matter.

And it continued this morning with the ABC program. Again, a news organization turned a blind eye to her history.

A sports analogy would be the Dogs’ quarterback is out for the year with an injury, so he takes a temporary position with a TV network as a game analyst. Before a contest between the Dogs and the Cats, the Cats’ coach shares intimate details of his team’s game plan with the TV announcers, who the coach presumes are unbiased because they are working for the media.

The sports director at the network would at least have to consider the possibility that the Dogs’ quarterback would share the Cats’ confidential game plan details with his team since he is merely on leave from them. The best decision for the sports director would be not to assign the Dogs’ quarterback to cover the Cats because of the potential conflict of interest, and that’s what CNN should have done in Brazile’s case. It’s that sort of terrible judgment that fuels the public mistrust of the mainstream media.

To what extent has that mistrust grown?

In late 2016, the Gallup polling organization reported that Americans’ trust and confidence in the mass media “to report the news fully, accurately and fairly” had dropped to its lowest level in the polling organization’s history.

Only 32 percent of those surveyed said they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media — down eight percentage points from 2015.

Gallup began asking this question in 1972, and on a yearly basis since 1997. Over the history of the trend, Americans’ trust and confidence hit its highest point in 1976, at 72 percent, in the wake of widely lauded examples of investigative journalism, including the Watergate scandal. After staying in the low to mid-50s through the late 1990s and into the early years of the new century, Americans’ trust in the media has fallen slowly and steadily. It has consistently been below a majority level since 2007.

Today’s appearance by Brazile was another reminder that the judgment exhibited by some major broadcast news organizations defies logic. This is just one element of the social, political, cultural and technological changes that have led us to the point where the Democratic and Republican parties were able to nominate two so completely unsuitable candidates — Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump — in 2016.

“Fixing Post-Truth Politics” charts the perfect storm of events that has led us to this point. The book also lays out the strategy for people who are sick of business as usual by the two primary political parties to change our political structure, which is currently fraught with “post-truth” politics.

Again, the book is available free on Kindle through a special promotion through Wednesday.