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This article seems to be talking about two things. One is trust in the government, and the other is trust in the media.

Regarding the media,is this really a shock?

I always find it hilarious when looking at what happens when someone makes a mistake in certain fields and if they are related to the business model in that field/respective industry.

For example, when engineering a car, their are standards for safety. In the event of an engineering mistake/failure, someone dies.

In journalism , their are supposed to be standards of integrity. If someone makes a mistake/failure, they make a retraction. Their is no death.

That is not to say that they are not serious about their jobs, rather a consequence of the business model and people's willingness to demand better journalism. (Whoever is first, gets all the eyeballs/clicks for advertising.)

Regarding the government, can you blame people?

For too long, we as a society do not prosecute people who lie let alone prosecute.

We as people tend to persecute/ villainize public corporations but turn a blind eye on our own local governments. It is quite concerning.

For some reason, Americans love to worry about things they cannot change at a federal level rather than focusing on the things they can change at a local level.

I feel that the article also talks about the ever increasing mistrust among many of our individual members -- which are all human beings -- of our society in our daily life...I found it to be quite resonating with my personal experiences, compared to those days a decade or even a few years ago...
I don't know if this growing social-wide mistrust is a result of the widening of social income gap, or a result of the accumulation of the various mass-media coverage on the incidents of attack, abuse, betrayal or coning and conspiracy, from the international level and national governmental level all the way through to the level of individuals, which somewhat serve to amplify the real fear and hatred that we hoard in our life.

I don't know if this is something that also is sensed by many other people; or, in the case it is, will this growing trend ever come to wane eventually, or evolve into something that no one could tame, and in the end to a point that fight or even war would become the only vent? -- the latter case happened so many times through the history, from the days of Peloponnesian War in the 400s BC (we know this to be the earliest one only because it was documented in the first history book found in western tradition, besides Herodotus's ), through the myriads of civil wars (including the one happened in America 150 years ago), to as recent as the cold war. The cause for many, if not all, of those bloody conflicts could ultimately be traced down to the mistrust among people.