The trust deficit
Trust is crucial in a functioning economy. We should all be alarmed by its decline.
Trust is crucial in a functioning market economy. An article in The Atlantic a little while ago likened trust to the social lubricant of capitalism. Every economic transaction involves trust. The banking system and fiat currencies are ultimately built upon it. There’s a well-established link between trust in a country and prosperity.
We spent a lot of time during the Capital Brief build phase thinking about trust — given trust in the media is alarmingly low. But media is not the only part of the economy with a trust problem.
According to a Roy Morgan survey of 2,000 Australians released today, trust in corporate Australia has never been lower. The survey attributed the decline to the string of corporate scandals that have dominated business news over the past couple years in the aftermath of the pandemic: the PwC tax leaks scandal, data breaches at Optus and Medibank and Qantas… where do we start with Qantas? The national carrier has been engulfed in a succession of trust-eroding controversies over the past couple of months, and we got another one today when the ACCC launched fresh legal proceedings against it.
It’s never wise to put too much faith in a single survey, but there seems to be a growing consensus and body of evidence that trust towards institutions — business, government, media — in developed economies is in significant decline.
How do we restore it? That is a harder issue to solve. The decline in trust towards media is often attributed to the rise of social media, which has created filter bubbles and also allowed misinformation to flourish. But to blame it entirely on that is a cop out: traditional media norms and practices are also a factor. Rethinking those norms and practices is one of the things we are trying to do in this newsroom.
