A friend sent me a copy of the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer and it's a great example of the liberal fixation on doomsaying. The entire report is about a "generation of institutional failures" that has produced plummeting trust and a surge in grievance even though the report's own data says exactly the opposite.
On page 6 the message is that elections "fail to improve trust," a melodramatic way of saying that nothing changed:
Page 8 declares an "unprecedented global decline" in employer trust even though their own chart shows only a one-year change of three points that still leaves trust up over the past seven years:
It gets worse. Page 9 declares that the poor are "mired in distrust." But their trust has gone five points since 2012 while trust among the affluent has gone up a healthy twelve points:
Finally, here's a weird chart that's a little hard to decipher. Sorry about that. But what it shows is that over the past five years the public view of government has improved considerably. People view government as 11 points more competent and 13 points more ethical than they did in 2020:
In fact, every institution has improved on both metrics. Not bad.
This is typical think tank work. Everything is presented in the worst possible way. Everything is a crisis. Everything is getting worse.
And sure, some of these numbers aren't great. But numbers in isolation don't mean much, especially for a fuzzy concept like trust. The only thing that matters is how they've changed over time—and in this case change has been uniformly for the better.
But I suppose it's hard to raise money if there's no crisis to sell.
When exactly did they last measure “trust” and how?
The document details this, for example
"Below is a list of statements. For each one, please rate how true you believe that statement is using a nine-point scale where one means it is “not at all true” and nine means it is “completely true”. "
and PDF page 2 details how in terms of sample size and method
"People view government as 11 points more competent and 13 points more ethical than they did in 2020."
I would think so. In 2020, the US president was Donald Trump. Before yesterday, it was not. Let's see how long that trend lasts.
I don't know Edelman and don't know what "trust in institutions" means if it doesn't mean media too, and we got a big and growing problem with news media rushing to curry favor with our new would-be fascist leader.
Politico. Well, of course. But ffs. From its founding editor and global editor-in-chief, the banner headline:
"Time to Admit It: Trump Is a Great President. He’s Still Trying To Be a Good One."
I think by "institutions" they mean large organizations like government agencies (at all levels), government in general, branches of government, large entities like banks and universities, and so on.
Media might fit in there very broadly, but it's not really what they're asking about. I think.
These are global measurements, right? I can't do anything about what is going on in the rest of world and have very little impact on what is going on in the good old USA (besides voting and contributing a relatively small amount of money).
What does the US trends look like?
Well, you're looking at poll data from 26 countries, so it's not clear how you come to the conclusion that the "liberal fixation" is somehow related to this report. They did a switcheroo in their methodologies so it's not quite perfect, but the two highest years of trust in the US gov't since 2001 were 2013 (53%) and 2016 (59%), and the two lowest years were 2009 (30%) and 2018 (33%).
If we're supposed to go by the public's wisdom, then Don't Ask Don't Tell was a prudent policy except maybe being gay shouldn't be punished, abortions should be legal but maybe also illegal, and apparently, overnight the economy has turned around if you're Republican. Which is to say, the general public doesn't know shit and that's the real reason why we can't have nice things. If you asked 100 people if some social media platforms violate the 1A, I guarantee you the majority will say yes.
we all know how Drum arrived at that conclusion
"It gets worse. Page 9 declares that the poor are "mired in distrust." But their trust has gone five points since 2012 while trust among the affluent has gone up a healthy twelve points:"
Oh please, spare me the intentional obtuseness. Did you not see how trust among high incomes is up 25% but for low incomes it remains underwater (even though it's up 10%)? That sure sounds like "mired in distrust" to me, buddy.
For me, , trust, in the institution of government, took a huge dive, as of yesterday
As a frog just sitting in this warm water, everything seems just fine.
Sure, it's a lot warmer than it was 10 minutes ago, but it's barely warmer than it was 1 minute ago.
This is fine, etc.
This piece on the weakness of aggregate numbers is interesting and might explain why, with the economic aggregate numbers very good for Biden, people didn't feel that things were all that great: https://lawliberty.org/the-trouble-with-aggregates/