WHATEVER HAPPENED TO TRUST?
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO TRUST?

Author(s): Leonie Haiden
Subject(s): Politics, Media studies, Communication studies, Evaluation research
Published by: NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence
Keywords: media; communication; fake news; truth; post-truth; trust; politics;
Summary/Abstract: Along with changes to the media landscape, low levels of trust in news media and government are often cited as creating a fertile environment for fake news and disinformation. According to polls and commentators, institutional trust reached a historical low in 2017. Edelman’s ‘Trust Barometer’ reports that governments and media are our least trusted institutions, with the number of respondents indicating their trust at 41% and 43% respectively. These and other similar findings by pollsters, such as the Pew Research Center, have been widely reported. Referring to his survey, Edelman declared in The Economist that ‘(t)rust—or, too often, the lack of it—is one of the central issues of our time’. Such an approach to trust makes several assumptions: First, that trust levels have indeed reached a point of ‘crisis’ that can be measured. Second, that trust and distrust stand in a binary relationship. And finally, that a pervasive lack of trust in society is one of the reasons we have ‘a broken media industry’. We will interrogate these assumptions, showing that while trust is indeed crucial to understanding today’s political developments, and fake news in particular, the way it is usually discussed is too simplistic and not conducive to finding adequate responses to fake news.

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