The ouster of James Bennet as editorial page editor of the New York Times is a sad day for newspaperdom — an editor driven from his helm by a staff revolt at his decision to run an op-ed piece by a United States senator on a major current issue. It’s the kind of thing that one might have expected during, say, the Cultural Revolution in Red China, not at the 10th most trusted newspaper in America.

Wait, did we say merely the 10th most trusted? Well, that was the last ranking we saw. It was listed in a study released in 2017 by the University of Missouri’s Reynolds School of Journalism. The study may not have been the most scientific piece of work. It was newsworthy enough, though. The Times had fetched up as the 17th most trusted news organ, the Missouri study reckoned, and among just newspapers, it was only at 10th place.

We quoted that study at the time it was issued in an editorial called “The Times’ Next Apology.” The Gray Lady had recently apologized for what turned out to be the scandal of its 2016 election coverage. It was caused, in our estimation, by the decision of the paper to deal with the rise of Donald Trump by abandoning the principle of objectivity. That was announced three months after Mr. Bennet joined the Times as editorial editor.

In any event, Mr. Bennet may have — in the eyes of the Times’ owners, at least — blundered in printing Senator Cotton’s piece. The descent of the paper from the pantheon of the most trusted newspapers in America, though, was underway well before Mr. Bennet returned to the paper. The paper that Missouri listed as the most trusted in America, moreover, turns out to be the Wall Street Journal.

In 2007, the Times had met Rupert Murdoch’s bid for the Journal with what we called a cataract of condescension. Paul Krugman issued a column saying that if Mr. Murdoch were to win the Journal it would “be a dark day for America’s news media — and American democracy.” Asked he: “Do we want to see one of America’s two serious national newspapers in the hands of a man who has done so much to mislead so many?”

The Washington Post, Mr. Krugman sneered at the time, as these columns noted, is “basically a Beltway paper, not a national one.” Mr. Krugman rued the fact that the FCC lacked grounds to block the purchase. The Times itself hoped that Mr. Murdoch “remembers that The Journal’s respect for its readers and the readers’ trust in The Journal are entwined.” Added it: “Lose one and you lose the other.”

So here we are, with the Times left to eat its own words. Defenders will boast that its market cap has soared along with its internet circulation. We’ll see if that lasts. Meantime, in the face of a crisis of its own making, the Times has just defenestrated a senior editor who had been on the short list to take over the editorship of the paper. It’s hard to imagine that the Times’ staff won’t soon be asking, “Who’s next?”

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Correction: May 2016 was the date of Mr. Bennet’s accession to editorial page editor of the Times; the date was given incorrectly in the first edition, and this edition has been reworked to correct that error.