“Trust, But Verify”: A Common-Sense Approach To Institutional Trust

June 25, 2025

By Avi Woolf

It should come as no surprise to readers of this magazine that America has a trust problem—specifically, trust in the major societal institutions and elites that run, shape, and influence the lives of most every American citizen, in good ways and bad, both directly and indirectly.

Poll after poll after poll shows Americans dropping from a mid-century height of trust in institutions such as the news media, higher education, law enforcement, and most government bodies. Whether you look at Gallup, Pew, or any other reputable polling institution (and in our day, polls as a whole are widely mistrusted themselves), the arrow seems to be pointing universally downward.

Perhaps more distressing for those of us on the right—whether of conservative or classical liberal or libertarian bent—is the fact that much of this mistrust is driven by people who identify as Republicans, as conservatives, or at least as leaning in that direction. While it is true that the collapse is also driven by self-identified independents, whether they lean right, center, or left, it is this decline in trust on the right that most worries me—and, perhaps, many of Fusion’s readers.

A number of caveats are in order, though. First, our data for national polls such as Gallup and Pew questions doesn’t go much farther back than around the time of FDR. We possess no comparable data showing whether the midcentury rise in trust and association was genuinely the norm from 1776 until the New Deal, or whether it was an anomaly in a generally low-trust nation, which would suggest that what we are experiencing now is more the norm in American life than we realize.

Second, these same polls consistently show higher levels of trust in local people and groups—local politicians, institutions, charities, and other such organizations—meaning that the main problem lies in the distant but powerful institutions and groups with national influence.

Taking this into consideration, it begs the question: How did we get here?

A few answers have been suggested. One pertains to the simple fact that the United States, like much of the developed world, is undergoing a socioeconomic and ideological realignment, with college graduates, and especially female college graduates, shifting strongly to the cultural and sometimes economic left, while non-college graduates—especially men—have drifted somewhat or strongly to the right.

The college-educated, who succeeded by dint of existing institutions and credentials, and who are taught and imbibe the ethos of these institutions’ importance, are naturally smaller “c” conservative about the same. Meanwhile, those who didn’t go to college and who see college-educated people running things mainly for their own benefit and disdaining those who couldn’t cut it in college, are more likely to mistrust and disdain institutions run by the same.

Another argument that makes the rounds is that social media ruined everything. Whether in the wake of the 2008 crash or the terminally online lives of people during the COVID lockdowns, exposure to all sorts of unfiltered ideas and factual claims—often dubious, outright false, or at least incomplete—led American society and especially those on the right down a conspiratorial “rabbit hole” from which it has never recovered.

There’s likely some truth to both these explanations, but I remain unconvinced that these are the main drivers of the problem. There were fewer college-educated Americans in the 1950s, yet there was much higher trust—even as conspiracy theories were definitely a thing back then, too. Just ask the John Birch Society.

Social media, moreover, is far likelier a scapegoat or a mirror than a cause. There is scant evidence that Democrats or the left-leaning are less conspiratorially minded—many believe that Putin changed the votes in swing states to get Trump elected, for instance, or in wildly exaggerated numbers of police killings of Black Americans.

No, what drove the death of trust in institutions on the right is something far simpler: the institutions—including big business, big tech, and many and maybe most government and public-minded bodies—revealed that they were not on their side and often actively antagonistic. Where once these things could be hidden and played down thanks to a mainstream media hammerlock on information, social media exposed enough real malfeasance to destroy the illusions many on the right had.

As Commentary editor John Podhoretz noted in an article on the subject years ago: "We had no desire or hunger to witness it, but we have seen the man behind the curtain, and he was a sight we cannot unsee."

Readers may respond: So what? Maybe now the right can finally throw off the last vestiges of its Burkean illusions, the idea that any of the institutions serve conservative ends or that defending them for their own sake is anything other than madness. Time to become full Menckenians or even Jacobins, ruthlessly mocking or destroying or at least weakening the power of people and places so determined to destroy us!

I and many others sympathize with this approach. For many decades, conservatives tried persuading, pleading, arguing, and cajoling institutions to change their ways and become truly representative of, and at least formally attentive to, the whole nation, not just whoever happened to be in vogue in the New York Times or New Yorker at that particular moment. Almost without exception, those efforts failed, with the results we see today. Efforts to establish alternative institutions have almost never succeeded in truly challenging the power of existing liberal ones, even though they were hijacked by the left and remain so.

This leaves people on the right fiercely debating what to do next, with no clear answer.

However, whatever side you take in this debate—whether you believe in “burning it down” à la many an online populist, co-opting or retaking the institutions along the lines of Chris Rufo’s ideas, or if you still believe in the views of more moderate thinkers such as Robert George - the fact remains that any change or transition towards healthier institutions will likely take years, if not decades.

In the meantime, people on the right need to find a way to navigate an inherently hostile institutional landscape in our efforts to improve matters, and there is none more ostensibly hostile to the right than the legacy media establishment. Yet angry as we all are with the media, I think there is a better path to being informed citizens that requires neither blind trust nor nihilistic disdain for anything that is even suspected of being “establishment.”

But before we discuss that path, we need to understand what we mean by “news” and how it is made and disseminated as such throughout the United States and much of the western world. Once we realize the basic ins and outs of the news business, we can better equip ourselves for being what I would call “trusting skeptics” of the information that drives much of our daily life, from politics to finance to crime to the weather.

While I do not claim to be an “expert” on the news and increasingly am unsure how to determine such expertise, I have worked in the political media on and off for about six years now, including a year and a half as a breaking news editor covering all the major and minor events following the October 7 attacks in Israel and the subsequent wars. The following breakdown of “how media works” is broadly based on my own experience as both a news consumer and producer, with the hope that it will help us understand what “news” is, so that we can better understand how to navigate it as conservatives.

I should note from the start that I will be referring solely to news reporting and sometimes to analysis, not opinion pieces, editorials, and the like. Like the question of institutions as a whole, the question of “acceptable opinion” within a given outlet is a subject worthy of its own article and will not be covered here. In this survey, I am solely interested in how information—presumably new information, considered to be important or interesting to readers—is collected, created, and published.

With that, let’s begin with the obvious question: How is news made?

The answer is that a lot depends on a given outlet’s resources in terms of money and people. The larger the outlet or organization, whether print, online, televised, or on radio, the more news items it will be able to produce. Not all news outlets were created equal in this respect, any more than all universities or museums. Every field has its Ivies, whom almost all follow or seek to emulate, whether rightly or wrongly.

The “Ivies” of the national and global media are outfits like the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse. These services are so predominant in terms of producing news stories that even major national outlets in big countries such as France and Germany and even the United States have to include many a “wire story” in their bylines, sometimes with accompanying editing by their local staff. A lower level of this sort of agency are international news networks such as CNN, Al Jazeera, BBC, and others.

Then there are the national legacy institutions, which sometimes have a global reach—your Wall Street Journals, New York Times, or Le Mondes. These tend to have smaller numbers of reporters and resources, but they compensate for that with prestige and especially close contacts with people in senior positions of power, as well as the ability to make people talk simply by using their name and long-standing reputation.

Most other outlets, at least regarding news outside their local or niche scope, have to rely to one degree or another on the above for at least the “rough draft” of the information they provide.

News is often referred to as the “first draft” of history, but it would be more accurate to say that it is the first “rough draft”—and as such, is prone to mistakes, errors of omission and commission, and the absence of critical context. This was true even before the recent capturing of the institutions, and is even more prevalent now.

There are all sorts of reasons for this. One of these is simply time—reporters, especially those in charge of breaking news items and the like, need to rush as fast as possible to be “first” on the Google searches or on television. Serious, in-depth research takes time and energy they simply do not have when having to cover industrial amounts of news stories a day.

Then there’s the problem of bias. While there are cases of clear coordination between journalists to run stories—think the infamous JournoList, the efforts to damn all alternative approaches to COVID as racist or murderous—most cases of bias do not come due to shadowy conspirators or a centralized effort by George Soros.

Rather, it comes from a simple and very human phenomenon—peer pressure, both explicit and implicit. Reporters may all work for competing outlets and even compete individually with one another, but like all professions, they also often need the assistance of other reporters for sources, ideas, and links. If there’s a sense that “you don’t talk about this” or “you don’t talk about this in this way,” then they won’t. And if they do, they’ll often get their inbox filled with angry complaints by their peers. Think of the infamous cover-up of President Biden’s mental condition, as documented by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.

Few have the courage to stand up to peer pressure. Furthermore, since fewer and fewer reporters, editors, and media workers come from outside the increasingly liberal and woke upper and professional middle class, many of the old habits of what was once a more working class or petit-bourgeois profession—true skepticism of everyone, a sense of how life works on the street, an avoidance of playing the social status game—have given way to the comfortable conformism of our modern day Babbitts.

The other source of bias is related to the above—conventional wisdom or “what everyone knows.” This is a whole raft of mental shortcuts used by time-starved and peer-pressure-fearing reporters and editors all the time in news reporting on all sorts of subjects.

You know at least some of them: extreme weather is always presumed connected to climate change, even without checking for evidence. Republicans always pounce on things rather than things being actual problems. School shooters are only identified and analyzed if they’re suspected to be right-wing and white, and so on.

Then there’s the problem of the sources. Again, reporters usually do not seek to deliberately deceive or misinform (there are exceptions, readers no doubt know examples). But in a time crunch, they will often seek out the most available sources. Oftentimes, these are honest people who genuinely seek to say what they know and no more. But oftentimes, the sources have an agenda of their own—activists and NGOs claiming to represent communities, disgruntled employees who seek to badmouth an institution or politician unfairly, half-truths, and bits and pieces of information someone heard from someone. And because, as always, time is of the essence, reporters are often a lot quicker to get one side than the other, who either doesn’t have the time or the resources to respond that day, and is relegated to paragraph 17.

Then there’s all the stuff that is simply not reported on because, again, “it’s just not done,” because of peer pressure, or fear of losing sources, or, of course, the horrifying possibility that the evil right-wing troglodytes might be right and even benefit politically. Again, there is no shortage of such stories—from the burying of stories about the origins of COVID or the harms caused by lockdown policies, to the open refusal to report on Hunter Biden’s laptop with its raft of evidence of criminality, to the aforementioned refusal to even inquire into the mental and physical condition of the 46^th President of the United States for years.

The final problem is one that’s universal—audience capture. News needs to make money, which means the people who write the donation checks or pay the subscription money or provide the clicks need to be appeased and flattered. Telling them what they don’t want to hear, even if it’s the truth, is a recipe for cutbacks and even closure. And for the MSM—that mostly means talking to a mostly liberal and even radical audience that expects its biases to be confirmed at every opportunity.

Faced with a news industry that is so thoroughly biased and often wrong (and almost never repentant), people on the right have turned to three possible responses—tuning out, total skepticism, and discerning trust. Let’s look at how viable and healthy each of those is.

Those who seek to tune out the news are ostensibly the smartest and healthiest ones. If everything’s a lie or manipulated, why bother tuning in at all? Just live your life and do as best you can in your own little corner of the world. After all, the massive political involvement of the American citizenry in the Trump era has proven to be a bust in terms of more healthy politics. Maybe things would be better if everyone (or at least more than now) stopped caring?

I agree—but with a caveat. That caveat is that news cannot be entirely avoided. Even if you’re listening passively to it in your car, on public transport, or at home, the news that is usually filtered through all the outlets mentioned earlier will reach you, so you need to be equipped with some tools for discerning what to trust and rely on and what not to.

Another option, one that is also increasingly popular on the right, is simply not to trust anyone who reports the news. The problem with this allegedly healthy skepticism is it is not a discerning skepticism, one which uses reason and common sense to try and figure out the truth from among the bias and partial facts. It is instead an anti-institutional skepticism, one which automatically assumes that whatever the “establishment” (a constantly moving target) says, the opposite must be true. Hence the interest in “rebel” or “subversive” podcasts, YouTube channels, and the like.

Yet this approach has its own drawbacks. After all, all the problems I mentioned regarding establishment media—audience capture, peer pressure, lack of time to truly delve deep into everything—applies to podcasts, as well. People who solely follow podcasts or even right-wing news outlets such as FOX News, thus end up with a mirror image problem of establishment media. They will get some of the truth and facts that the other side won’t report, but the information they imbibe will still be partial, distorted. And that’s without getting into the fact that even right-wing media and podcasts have no real choice but to at least selectively consume and report establishment media stories due to the disparity in resources.

In my opinion, as both a news consumer and producer, the best approach to news and information comes from a famous saying by President Ronald Reagan: “Trust, but verify.” It was a saying commonly used in the Soviet Union when normal citizens could not really know what truth was in a tightly controlled totalitarian empire, but who nevertheless needed to have some idea of what was going on, and one very appropriate for right-wingers who want to or will be informed but don’t know who to trust.

This approach will be based not on just reading or consuming specific outlets (though I will recommend some below) but rather a set of what I might call “media consumption virtues” and a conservative disposition that allows right-wingers to be informed but neither gullible nor nihilist.

The first virtue is prudence. Whenever you hear a story, especially one that sounds outrageous, wait. Say to yourself, “maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t,” and wait for the full picture to emerge, which usually happens in a few days at most—if not in one outlet, then in another. Avoid the temptation to take the ragebait. And even if you get caught up in the moment—we all do—don’t make it personal. Your life and values do not rise and fall on whether one of thousands of daily news stories is true or not.

The second is experience. I’ve been working as a news editor for a year and a half, and it took me some time before I knew how to separate wheat from chaff, good sources and outlets from bad, and when to tune certain subjects out entirely until a certain threshold of evidence is passed. There are no shortcuts to becoming a good new consumer. You just have to keep at it.

The third is variety. This may be the hardest one to do. But as I said—no media outlet has the whole truth. So be open to those jerks at [fill in the blank] sometimes getting it right. Even better examples, which I hope will pave the way to a new era in news, are what I call “heterodox” publications. These are centrist liberal but conservative-friendly places like Unherd, The Free Press, Tablet magazine, and others which recreate the shared public space for discussion of facts and meaning that traditional media used to host.

Variety also includes social media, especially X/Twitter. A lot of people bash it because of all the falsehoods that people promote there, but I’ve seen none better as a source not only for news but also fact-checking, analysis, and the kind of rough-and-tumble give-and-take that used to characterize the news business before it became an unofficial party line borg for the global professional upper middle class.

We live in an era of rebuilding and reconstruction. Old institutions we all once relied on, no matter what our beliefs or ideologies, have been hijacked to often serve what we consider a destructive agenda, and they resist all efforts at reform. They will need to be contained and then replaced, a process which will likely take decades.

In the meantime, we all need to learn how to become sane information consumers in an insane media world. I hope my advice will help in that direction.

Avi Woolf has published articles in Commentary, National Review, and The Washington Examiner. He also hosts a podcast series on the Gilded Age entitled Stumbling Colossus.