The institutions that were supposed to tell the public what was true failed on Iraq, reversed on COVID, and suppressed the lab-leak question, and the three competing replacements are all being built simultaneously without waiting for permission.
Thirty people. A horseshoe of desks. Phones ringing in waves timed to the news cycle. A whiteboard listing stories that will lead the evening broadcast. By six o'clock, the decisions made in this windowless room shape what 300 million people think happened today. The woman running the meeting has a PhD in political science and has not spoken to anyone outside the industry socially in three weeks. She is deciding what you need to know.
In 1976, Gallup measured trust in mass media at 72 percent. In 2024, 32 percent. The decline was not steady. It fell off a series of cliffs, and each cliff had a name. Colin Powell's vial of white powder at the UN in 2003 — weapons that did not exist, amplified by every major outlet. The Surgeon General tweeting in March 2020 that masks were "NOT effective," then reversing four months later. The lab-leak hypothesis dismissed as conspiracy while internal emails showed private doubt. Each reversal made individual sense. Cumulatively, they taught tens of millions a lesson the institutions did not intend: the people in the room do not always know what they are telling you.
The collapse did not distribute evenly. Democrats' trust in media sat at 54 percent in 2024. Republicans' at 12. The country did not just lose faith — it split into parallel epistemologies, each with its own experts and its own definition of "fact." US media leans roughly 5:1 liberal to conservative among working journalists. The audiences who noticed built alternatives — talk radio, then Fox, then a podcast-and-Substack infrastructure rivaling legacy reach. The left consolidated around institutions increasingly speaking to themselves.
The polio vaccine rollout succeeded because a trusted apparatus executed at scale — church bells rang, 90 percent of children were vaccinated within four years — and the think the answer is better institutions, not no institutions. But the lab-leak hypothesis survived because kept it alive while institutional science suppressed it, proving distributed networks can catch what legacy media buries. Wikipedia's 60 million articles in 300 languages demonstrate that open, process-driven systems can produce reliable knowledge at scale — a model the want to extend. And a growing number of people have stopped asking who to believe entirely, asking instead what verification infrastructure actually exists — the position, and perhaps the most unsettling one.
The graveyard of projects that tried to solve this — fact-checking organizations that changed no minds, media literacy programs whose graduates identified bias only in sources they already rejected — suggests the crisis is not informational. It is architectural. Something aspiring to accuracy has to replace what collapsed. Every day it goes unresolved, 300 million people make decisions about their health, their votes, and their children using an information environment everyone agrees is broken and nobody agrees how to fix.
Gallup measured trust in American mass media at 72 percent in 1976 and 32 percent in 2024. The decline was not gradual. It fell off a series of cliffs, each with a name: Colin Powell's imaginary weapons of mass destruction amplified by every major outlet in 2003, the Surgeon General tweeting that masks were not effective against COVID before reversing four months later, the lab-leak hypothesis dismissed as conspiracy while internal emails showed private acknowledgment it was plausible. Each reversal made individual sense. Cumulatively, they taught tens of millions of people that the institutions telling them what was true did not always know, and would not admit it until after it mattered. The country did not just lose trust. It split into parallel epistemologies — each with its own experts, its own evidence standards, and its own definition of the word fact — and the infrastructure designed for three broadcast networks is still running in a world where everyone has a transmitter and nobody shares an antenna.
Where do you stand?
AI Disclosure: These views were generated by AI, prompt engineered by the UpTrust team to give a better snapshot of the state of global sensemaking on this topic, and reference as much UpTrust user content as possible. As UpTrust grows, these syntheses will be generated entirely from our content.