The Trust Deficit

An Idea to Carry

We trust the wrong metrics and are surprised when we don’t get the right results. Speed without care is a quick route to irrelevance.

The Cost of Cheap Content is Trust, and Trust Takes Years to Rebuild

Signals & Stories

The Chicago Sun-Times recently ran a summer reading list. Only one problem: many of the books didn’t exist.

The list was written by a freelancer using generative AI. No fact-checking. No disclosure. Just fiction posing as fact, published by a once-reputable outlet. A reminder that even in legacy institutions, the lights of editorial judgment are flickering.

It wasn’t just a one-off error; it was a crack in the foundation. Another public institution, another notch down in trust.

Gallup Data Tells a Sobering Story

Over the past several years …

• Trust in newspapers: down from 36% to 18%.

• Trust in Congress: down from 30% to 9%.

• Trust in higher education, banks, and the presidency: all in freefall.

• Big business? Just 16% of Americans say they trust it.

One exception is small businesses, which are still trusted by two-thirds. Real people, doing real work, one relationship at a time. Perhaps that’s the clue.

Trust Isn’t Clickable

In a digital world, attention is currency. But most marketers are chasing the wrong denominations. Page views and impressions are easy to measure. Trust isn’t. And so, it’s neglected.

But Trust Is the Only Real Moat Left

It’s what keeps customers when the algorithms change. It’s what gets you invited back when the noise dies down. It’s what lingers long after your content is forgotten.

AI: The Accelerator or the Underminer?

AI is like fire. It can warm or burn, depending on how you use it. Right now, too many are playing with it unsupervised. The result? Content that’s fast, frictionless, and fundamentally untrustworthy.

The Edelman Trust Barometer shows only 32% of Americans trust AI. Which begs the question: If they don’t trust the tool, why would they trust the work it produces?

One Final Thought

Speed is seductive. Efficiency looks like progress. But trust doesn’t scale on demand. It’s built in the pauses, the disclosures, the moments we double-check. Because it matters.

This summer, as AI floods the content world and everyone races to the next shiny thing, ask yourself:

What Signal Are You Sending?

We will be talking about ways to build trust in marketing, communication and client strategy in future editions of Gravitas Signal.