Say what you will about The Washington Post’s much-maligned decision not to endorse a U.S. presidential candidate in 2024, but Jeff Bezos had a point when he wrote this: “Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion.”
Bezos described the perilously low levels of public trust in the news media. Gallup’s latest survey found that only 31% of American adults express at least basic confidence in the mainstream press. It gets worse when you think of it this way: 7 in 10 U.S. adults have little or no faith in what journalists report.
This trust shortfall that media people have been wringing their hands about for at least a decade now — well, it’s not just a media problem at all. It is a much bigger challenge facing knowledge institutions and professions as a whole. And in 2025, we will begin to reckon with the trust crisis for what it really is: an indictment of how broken the relationship has become between institutions that create and disseminate knowledge for society and the people they seek to serve.
When it comes to knowledge institutions such as medicine, higher education, and journalism, there is an implicit bargain at work: Lay people agree to rely on professionals (e.g., doctors, scientists, lawyers, professors, and, yes, journalists) for expert judgment; and, in turn, these professionals agree to act ethically and in good faith. But that arrangement only works when people believe they can trust these institutions to do the right thing.
That belief has hit a breaking point. Universities have lost goodwill in the wake of poorly handled protests and encampments on college campuses; medical professionals have seen their reputation take a hit from the mismanagement of pandemic-era guidance that resulted in growing antagonism toward vaccination and other healthcare interventions; and journalists have been roundly criticized, by Democrats as well as Republicans, for failing to cover the biggest story of the 2024 election: “the creeping red wave that showed Trump gaining voters in over 90% of America’s more than 3,000 counties.”
Such antipathy toward the press is nothing new, and the erosion of trust in other knowledge institutions (especially medicine and higher education) has been slowly gathering for years, but in 2025, we will begin to recognize more fully how intertwined are these trust crises facing the professions. We’ll also see how far the expert class remains from not only grasping the scope of the problem but taking the steps that will be required to solve it.
First, people increasingly see these knowledge institutions as “elitist,” disingenuous, and acting primarily out of self-interest rather than in the interests of the public they seek to serve. In my ongoing research with Jacob L. Nelson (see here, here, and here), we find that these feelings of frustration toward knowledge institutions cannot be dismissed as partisan reactions (as if this only applied to Trump supporters alone); rather, the anger draws from a deeper disillusionment toward seemingly out-of-touch credentialed experts that may be more widespread than has previously been acknowledged by the professions themselves. So the extent of the challenge calls for a reckoning with reality.
To improve their standing among the public, knowledge institutions must think hard about what authenticity means in their work. While perceived authenticity has always been an important piece of evaluating trustworthiness, performed authenticity has become much more important than ever before because of social media. So while journalists, doctors, and professors assume their expertise is inherently obvious and trustworthy, the people they seek to serve increasingly perceive them and the professions they represent as self-seeking and insincere, especially compared to what may appear to be more relatable and “authentic” sources of information, such as wellness influencers, podcasters, politicians, and others who have built their brands around questioning established, institutionalized forms of knowledge.
Fixing this problem won’t be accomplished all in a year (or perhaps even a decade), but in 2025 at least we’ll stop fighting reality.
Seth Lewis is the Shirley Papé Chair in Emerging Media in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon.
