“Trust” has been popping up a lot in my feeds lately. As an unrepentant news junkie, former tech journalist, and current PR and communications professional, I can’t help but notice when a word starts trending. One obvious contributor to the “trust” trend is that Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales has been doing the launch-interview newsrounds promoting his new book, The Seven Rules of Trust. Simultaneously, serial tech entrepreneur Elon Musk is promoting the debut of his new AI-based competitor to Wikipedia. But an OG tech bro PR battle doesn’t fully explain why the subject of trust is having a moment. At the start of the month, Gallup released poll results revealing “Trust in Media at New Low of 28% in U.S.” A few weeks later, NBC News unveiled a new marketing campaign “that attempts to address low trust in news media.” In the interim, Muck Rack hosted a webinar dubbed “Inside Modern PR: Trust, Timing, and the Power of Being Believed.” Across the professional news and information ecosystem, trust is everywhere and nowhere all at once.  

Trust in flux

That Muck Rack webinar was accompanied by a marketing report (based on an IPSOS quantitative survey of 1000 US adults aged 18–65), which showed:

• Only 5% trust the news they consume completely
• Local news (57%) and legacy news institutions (44%) are the most trusted
• But most (59%) find their news on social media platforms
• And most (56%) say their trust in news sources has decreased over the past five years

So the survey says most people don’t trust news media and they don’t consume news from sources they do trust but instead find it on social platforms and now they trust news media even less … What gives?  

Trust in context

In our digital age, engagement is the metric by which all things are measured, including information. This tends to reward outrage (engagement!) and erode nuance (TL;DR). Who among us mere mortals can always resist rubbernecking at a car crash or feeding a troll. “Content” need not be credible to drive engagement. Traditional news media output achieves value just like everything else on the interwebs — based on amplification and reaction. This is not news to the news business — anyone who has ever worked in journalism is familiar with the adage, “If it bleeds, it leads.” What’s different is that the value must be earned amidst ceaseless new streams of monetized content from creators, influencers, bots, and multitudes of average joes — all of it mashed together and sprayed at your brain through a firehose of distraction algorithmically tuned to capture attention, elicit response, and keep you scrolling for more. How is anyone supposed to trust anything when there is just so much stuff coming at you from all over the place all the time? Audiences are not uninformed; they’re overwhelmed. But all is not lost.  

Trust is a human process

Going back to where we started with the Jimmy Wales book tour, he said a couple of interesting things in a NYT interview:

1. “In day-to-day life, people still do trust each other. People generally think most people are basically nice and we’re all human beings bumping along on the planet trying to do our best.”
2. “All the noise in the world and all these people ranting, that’s not the real thing. The real thing is genuine human knowledge, genuine discourse, genuinely grappling with the difficult issues of our day. That’s actually super-valuable.”

Call me naive, but both of those statements ring very true. And they serve as good guides for grounding how to best approach communications in both personal and professional contexts, in both the digital world and the real one. For B2B public relations and communications efforts, third-party validation is more important than ever. People may trust traditional news media less than they used to, but earned and vetted coverage is still the gold standard. This is not because traditional news media is flawless, but because it introduces friction and accountability — which are invaluable for making thoughtful decisions. Social media is important for visibility, but you aren’t required to participate on every platform or offer a hot take on every trending topic. Our philosophy at Sterling Communications is that both organizations and individuals build credibility by demonstrating empathy, integrity, and authority in “good faith” dialogue. You build trust by building relationships — with other human beings. If you want to be trusted, be trustworthy. Regardless of what the algorithms incentivize, use these handy human-first communications habits as your guide:

• Be honest. Own mistakes quickly.
• Keep promises. If you say you’re going to do something, do it.
• Show up and show your work. Consistency and transparency beat spin.
• Choose credible venues. Seek platforms that value verification over virality.
• Lead with empathy. Respectful curiosity builds credibility.

The real crisis of trust isn’t in the media — it’s in how we choose to communicate. And that’s something we can fix. —Deirdre