A Half-Century’s Erosion of Trust
Confidence in institutions has been collapsing since the 1970’s. What happened?
“Uncertainty is an acid, corrosive to authority. Once the monopoly on information is lost, so too is our trust. Every presidential statement, every CIA assessment, every investigative report by a great newspaper, suddenly acquired an arbitrary aspect, and seemed grounded in moral predilection rather than intellectual rigor.”
-Martin Gurri, Revolt of the Public
The world has changed drastically since the 1970’s. New information is no longer scarce, it is overwhelmingly abundant. Anyone can be a political pundit or an investigative journalist with a smartphone and a Facebook account. For media outlets scavenging for relevance today, what’s true or fake is increasingly replaced by what’s right or wrong.
Via Gallup’s Confidence in Institutions study, there has been a significant decline in the public’s trust in media. Confidence in newspaper media is at historic lows.
