I’m not especially impressed with either of our major political parties these days, but I must say, the Democratic party has a weird fondness for celebrating their promising “up-and-coming candidates” who lose close elections, but never actually win any significant ones. See Stacey Abrams, Beto O’Rourke, Jason Kander, etc. etc.
The Problem
I receive at least one email a day from Axios, an online news organization that reports on a range of issues. In recent months, they’ve joined the chorus of news outlets that have been increasingly reporting on the decline of trust in basic social institutions.
Major polling organizations have been tracking public trust for decades: trust in government, trust in the courts, trust in businesses, trust in schools, and more. The general trendline? Nobody trusts anyone or anything as much as they used to.
I initially intended to provide hyperlinks to the countless stories on this issue. However, out of laziness and the sheer volume of articles with a headline about declining trust, I opted to let you just take my word for it.
But can you take my word for it? Should you?
Some readers will simply trust me based on a prior relationship they have with me. I’ve shown myself to be a reliable person in their eyes, and since the stakes aren’t any higher than my reporting on news stories I’ve read, they’re content to do that.
Others will immediately trust me on this because what I’m saying confirms what they themselves have been observing. They see the erosion of public trust. Maybe they count themselves among the skeptical, too.
Others might wonder if the situation is as dire as everyone is saying. They’ll then head to their favorite news source to try to discern if the polling (and the reporting about the polling) seems legitimate. But what basis they will use to discern if those sources are trustworthy?
The problem is two-fold, depending on how you look at it. Either the decline of public trust itself the biggest problem, or the fact that we often lack clear standards by which to adjudicate who should or shouldn’t be trusted. It’s one thing to say, “It’s too bad we can’t trust our local school board members.” It’s another to say, “We have a sufficiently fair and prudent process by which to choose trustworthy school board members.”
To change the illustration, maybe you think trusting the IRS is foolhardy. However, you trust them sufficiently to keep paying your taxes. Moreover, you believe you have sufficient reasons to distrust them, even while they happen to be an institution about which the average person has little information or understanding. So then, what heightens your distrust? Is it the paucity of information, or concerns about the information you do have?
There are at least two practical issues associated with this that interest me—one practical and one epistemological.
First, the fact that in the example above one continues paying taxes suggests that they have a sufficient level of trust to engage in a lawful process. Even if one says, “No, I’d just rather not deal with the consequences of not paying,” they betray some level of confidence (trust) in the legal system to do what it’s designed to do to those owing back taxes! Another possibility is that you trust the IRS to fulfil the minimum level of tasks entrusted to it, but you reserve the right to be suspicious toward some of its other activities. But as a practical matter, your level of distrust isn’t enough to undermine the entire system.
Is it the case, then, that when we think about notions like public trust, the kind of trust we need to be most concerned with has more to do with social institutions fulfilling minimal, area-specific purposes, and not garnering the unwavering trust of large swaths of the public? Simply put, is public trust an intrinsic good, or is it simply a means to an end? Should bureaucrats and journalists keep wringing their hands over a level of skepticism—or what we might just call “qualified or provisional trust?”
Another practical aspect of trust is already at work in civil society, despite how poor conditions seem to be sometimes. The fact that people continue to drive on through greenlights and over older bridges, cast votes, or swipe their debit cards suggests that people have enough functional trust in “the system.” So maybe some forms of distrust are much more pernicious and problematic than others.
Second, sometimes people who express distrust are guilty of what we might call “epistemological haziness.” Everyone has heard an uncle or someone in Sunday School casually remark, “I don’t really trust the big tech companies.” Of course, it could just as likely be the Postal Service, state election officials, or Walmart. But when asked to explain their distrust, they often struggle for words or logic.
Such distrust is more of an emotional or instinctual sentiment, to which I cannot help but say, “I’m sorry. Your gut isn’t a sufficient basis to make sweeping claims about entire processes, systems, or groups of people. It may be sufficient for you to make specific personal decisions about where you’d prefer to shop, vacation, invest, and the like, but it’s irresponsible to commend to others an entire epistemology on that.” This type of epistemology isn’t much different than Critical Race Theory (in its contemporary form):
CRT Advocate: “Racism permeates society!”
Neighbor: “Does it? How do you know?”
CRT Advocate: “I see it everywhere!”
Neighbor: “Really? How do you know that’s what you’re seeing?”
CRT Advocate: “Any honest person can just see it and feel it!”
Neighbor: “Okay. Sure. What must I do to be non-racist?”
Now that last line was a little cheeky, but I hope my basic concern stands. On the one hand, people express patriotic-sounding fears over the state of public trust without an honest investigation into its most likely causes and cures—or without carefully considering how severe a problem it really is. Or, people wallow in epistemic haziness, thinking distrust, skepticism, and cynicism to be next to godliness.
Why We Don’t Trust
Within journalistic circles the purported causes of public distrust are many and familiar: tribalism, news silos, disinformation from foreign actors, and judicial extremism. Each of these deserves its own book-length analysis, but let me offer one general observation and two specific case studies.
My general observation is that institutional incompetence and/or hypocrisy is as obvious of a reason as anything for why people do not trust institutions. When people don’t feel that the institutions around them are honest brokers when it comes to shared information, products manufactured, or services rendered, they reasonably withhold their trust.
Now from a Christian standpoint I think there are two caveats or qualifications we must make here. First, we believe in repentance. While most of us don’t believe in the perfectibility of human beings this side of the eschaton (I’ll let my Wesleyan friends speak for themselves), our belief in repentance implies some potential for real change. Believing in depravity doesn’t nullify this fact. Therefore, we must believe that just as trust can be lost, it can be regained to some degree. Reform and renewal are possible.
A second caveat is that entire industries or domains of existence shouldn’t endure our equal and unending skepticism when an individual breaks trust. While I’m deeply troubled by Roman Catholic theology, and even more deeply troubled over clergy sexual misconduct, am I prepared to render all priests pedophiles? Is it fair that all tech companies, now and forever, should be considered menaces to human well-being? Are all politicians actual dishonest, power-hungry sleazeballs, given that so many seem to be? In other words, we need not throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to human nature. Common grace is real. At the very least it implies that some people, even within troubled industries, mostly do well and have some integrity.
Case Studies
Now that I’ve cleared my throat, let me zero in on two specific contradictions in the current discussion. I’ll share one here, and one in a follow-up newsletter.
First, I constantly hear about our “fragmented media environment.” This language is intentionally pejorative. Fragmentation isn’t a positive quality. In theory, a fragmented media environment can simply refer to the proliferation of print and digital media outlets. That seems an innocent enough fact, and not surprising given the entrepreneurial tendency of Americans and the centrality of the Internet to our lives. However, what a phrase this like ends up meaning on the lips of long-time, established journalists is, “The good ole days are gone. Now we have all these media outfits that are sketchy and suspicious, tailored to particular partisan biases.”
The irony is rich. For decades three major news stations had a monopoly on the public imagination (NBC, CBS, and ABC). Then CNN came along. Some years later Fox came along. Fast-forward 25 years or so and now we have thousands of ways to access news. If I’m employed by one of the big guys—print or digital—I have every reason to view other news media with cynicism. Moreover, I have every reason to pretend as if I’m above the fray, free from partisan biases and lenses in reporting on and framing stories.
To put the pieces together, the argument goes something like this. In our partisan, polarized, tribalistic age, people inevitably only want to hear the stories and takes that confirm what they already believe—confirmation bias, it’s commonly called. In such an environment, all kinds of so-called news sources have the potential to contribute to the partisan, polarized, tribalistic spirit of our times.
Those decrying our fragmented media environment are completely right about one thing: those in news media/journalism have the potential to help or hinder the overall level of public trust. They report on some things but ignore others. They highlight some scandals but ignore others. They give space to some points of view but not others.
The public may not generally be intelligent, but they’re not stupid either. They see the failures of many of the traditional/legacy news networks and they turn elsewhere. This doesn’t mean all their suspicions and frustrations are valid or even healthy, but it is certainly part of what fosters and fuels people’s distrust. There’s no reason to dismiss the entire journalistic enterprise. But the “fragmented media environment” narrative works, but largely not for the reasons given. It’s a symptom as much as it is a cause.
In my next newsletter, I’ll offer another problematic case study and some practical thoughts for moving forward.
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Catch-up week
Quote of the Week:
When we look back over the pandemic era, one of the signal failures will be the inability to acknowledge that many key decisions—from our vaccine policy to our lockdown strategy to our approach to businesses and schools—are fundamentally questions of statesmanship, involving not just the right principles or the right technical understanding of the problem but the prudential balancing of many competing goods.
On the libertarian and populist right, that failure usually involved a recourse to “freedom” as a conversation-stopper, a way to deny that even a deadly disease required any compromises with normal life at all.
But for liberals, especially blue-state politicians and officials, the failure has more often involved invoking capital-S Science to evade their own responsibilities: pretending that a certain kind of scientific knowledge, ideally backed by impeccable credentials, can substitute for prudential and moral judgments that we are all qualified to argue over, and that our elected leaders, not our scientists, have the final responsibility to make.