The Trust Crisis

I wanted to flag a recent piece I found from Axios which gets at the issue of trust. While this is focused on the political and business world, it also has implications for trust in marketing and future of digital tools. We may eventually be at a tipping point where people move away from using certain tools and that could impact where people view ads, how they trust the content.



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The big picture: This trust crisis — flagged for us as part of a larger presentation by lobbyist Bruce Mehlman — is based on polling that shows how little confidence the public has in powerful players and institutions, including the ones that would be most likely to be drawn into a contested election.

• There's a trust chasm over President Trump, with Republicans showing far more confidence in him than Democrats and independents, according to an October Fox News poll.
• But there's also low trust in the Supreme Court — especially among Democrats and independents — and trust in Congress is at rock bottom with everybody.
• And yes, the news media's trust level is abysmal too, especially with Republicans and independents.

Other surveys have also found more evidence of deep distrust in leaders and institutions.

• The Pew Research Center found a huge partisan divide in trust in politically appointed agency heads (self-described Republicans expressed more confidence in those leaders than Democrats).