Trust Issues
Trust Me On This
The erosion of faith in the media, our government and our neighbors will have grave social implications
Like hope and curiosity, the instinct to trust is part of our spiritual structure. You can do just fine without it, so long as you aren’t bothered by a world that seems flat, small, and mean.
But trust, like a bone, seldom grows back as strong once it’s been broken. For citizens in mature democracies, this helps explain the hunched, aching state of the body politic, the toll taken by the long-term collapse of trust that scholars and marketers have been tracking for the past 50 years. From a peak in the 1960s, trust in institutions, whether government or church, business or academia, has hit a record low. As for the press, which the Founders chose to protect as our only constitutionally licensed industry, less than a third of Americans now trust the media to report the news fairly, according to Gallup, and a majority think news organizations are politicized and elitist. (Presumably, we still trust Gallup.)
There’s irony here, salt in the wound: The high point of trust in journalism, at 72 percent, came in 1976, as reporters held accountable leaders who had lied about everything from Vietnam to Watergate. Newspapers took their names as mission…
