The legacy corporate state media, the ruling class, and corporate America business leaders aren’t inspiring much confidence in the rabble these days, according to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer that gauges public trust in various institutions across the globe — and the TDS Round II we’re likely about to be treated to by the Deep State and multinational corporations (who won’t like the tariffs and other weapons of the “trade wars” Trump may launch) and pearl-clutching MSNBC harlots aren’t likely to boost their figures anytime soon.
Sixty-nine percent, 68%, and 70% of respondents reported believing that government leaders, business leaders, and journalists/reporters, respectively, “purposely mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.”
Related: Elite Media Propagandist Cries at Davos: ‘We Owned the News’
Via Statista (emphasis added):
An increasing proportion of respondents across the 28 polled countries worry that government and business leaders as well as journalists and reporters are purposely misleading people by saying things they know are false or are gross exaggerations. Around seven in ten people believe this to be the case for each of the groups of leaders, with distrust against journalists and reporters most widespread, albeit marginally. As the following chart shows, the share of people who worry about this has increased significantly since the survey was asked in 2021 (up 11-12 percentage points in each case).
Respondents in the lower income quartile reported feeling greater levels of distrust of these leaders than those in the top quartile. Where 63 percent of high income respondents said they had trust in business, government, media and NGOs, the figure was just 48 percent among low income respondents.
Scientists and teachers were the favored voices when respondents were asked which groups of people they thought could be trusted to do what is right*, at 77 and 75 percent, respectively. More than 32,000 people were polled across 28 countries in each survey wave.
*Trust in “scientists” as a category, to me — aside from the fact that they dredged up 30% of respondents who actually trust government leaders — the most shocking finding of the study.
The Science™ as an institution is one of the most corrupt of them all, right up there with the government, finance, and “intelligence” sectors.
COVID should have seen to it that the reverence for “scientists” in the aggregate, drummed into the public’s collective head through relentless propaganda and public “education” for decades, evaporated entirely — leaving room, of course, for the rightful nuance to acknowledge and support heroic scientists willing to say true things in recent years at the risk of their livelihood and reputations.
As an addendum, obviously, the whole no-trust-in-media doesn’t reply to the crack team we’ve got here at PJ Media, or Salem Media more broadly. We are the pristine exception to the rule.
In all seriousness, though, I wish these surveys would differentiate between types of media. Salem Media, or Substack, or any of the great journalists who just post stuff on X these days, share very little in common with the CNNs and the Washington Posts of the world, which are basically the equivalent of North Korean state television with the trappings of Democracy™.
