The trust statistics that suggest a revolution is brewing
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Today: The Edelman Trust Barometer suggests society is approaching boiling point, but will anyone heed the warning?
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Grievance procedures
A decade ago, an anonymous sub editor on The Australian Financial Review passed judgement on the state of play. Writing dummy copy on an early layout of the day’s front page, they pointed out: “WORLDISFUKT”.
This small headline made big headlines when it was accidentally printed and distributed in Perth. While they may have got in trouble for the language, nobody could complain that it wasn’t a pithy and accurate summary.
I found myself thinking a similar thing this morning as I watched Edelman’s Australian CEO Tom Robinson present the findings from this year’s Trust Barometer survey.
Taking a narrow view, the news was predictably bad for media, with public trust falling again. Of the four key Australian public institutions surveyed, public trust in media is the worst, with just 37% now saying they trusted the media. That was behind government (47%), business (54%) and non-governmental organisations (56%).
Even the stat that 68% of people agree with the statement that journalists and reporters purposely mislead them through falsities or gross exaggeration was not the most frightening.
The truly scary number was the high percentage of young people who have completely lost belief in society’s leaders, and are getting angry enough to do something about it.