OPINION:
Credibility requires honesty with consistency. America has managed to rise to its transcendent position in the world by erecting solid institutions, and their trustworthiness has held them all together — until now. Disturbingly, confidence in the nation’s foundational organizations is spiraling downward. The trend casts a shadow over a future that once was so bright.
A survey published Tuesday by the Pew Research Center accentuates the decline against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. Trust in scientists has slipped during the past two years, and particularly so for medical scientists — the sort responsible for introducing the innovative but still-experimental coronavirus vaccines. Americans expressing a great deal of confidence that those professionals are acting in the best interests of the public has fallen from 43% in April 2020 as the pandemic took hold to 29%. Those granting them little or no trust have surged from 11% to 22%.
The highest level of distrust is reserved, however, for elected officials. The proportion of respondents showing the political class a great deal of confidence has fallen from a pitiful 4% to a pathetic 2%, while those affording them little to none climbed from 64% to 76%. Evidently, Americans tuning in to current events in Washington aren’t certain whether they are watching CSPAN or Comedy Central.
Fittingly, major media tasked with factual reporting of the news have fallen down the stairs with politicians into the basement of public confidence. Trust in the current crop of journalists has slid from 9% to 6% during the pandemic era, while their untrustworthiness quotient has increased from 54% to 60%.
Americans have a nose for nonsense, and elected officials have teamed up with sympaticos in the press to spread it good and thick across the national landscape. The New York Times and The Washington Post won Pulitzer Prizes for their inventive coverage of the Trump-Russia collusion saga, only to watch with dread as evidence emerges that the presidential campaign conspiring to steal the 2016 election was not Donald Trump’s, but Hillary Clinton’s.
Woven into the daily buzz, coverage of COVID-19 deaths by the hundreds of thousands have riveted attention on lifesaving guidance. Americans watching too closely, though, have suffered cognitive whiplash as White House medical mavens Anthony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky issue advisories on face masks pointing in one direction, then the other, followed by welcome vaccine recommendations that harden into job-threatening mandates.
Even the most trusting citizens watching President Biden plead for compliance with his double-vax-plus-booster campaign can only shake their heads in disbelief as he grants illegal and unvaccinated immigrants from the four corners of the earth open access to the U.S. homeland while reinforcing the borders of Europe’s NATO allies.
Thanks to misguided leaders and their media apologists, America’s institutions are shrouded in distrust. If there is a glimmer of optimism, it’s because their credibility has nowhere to go but up.
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