Television eroded government trust through visceral imagery, not civic displacement

Evidence

One might suppose that the first and last steps of Putnam’s argument are right: watching television and declining confidence in government are causally related. The cause, however, might not be Putnam’s indirect one of displacement of group activities in favor of time before the television screen, which leads to fewer trusting relationships in group activities, which in turn spills over into less trust in government. The intervening step need not be this claim of spillover but might instead be the claim that citizens, in part because of the visual power of television, now know too much to have confidence in many officials. Television does not tell us as much about politics as our former newspapers did, but it gives us information far more viscerally. Television helped to destroy the credibility of many local politicians in the South during the civil rights era (Garrow 1978), and it helped to destroy the credibility of the war in Vietnam. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 743

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges Putnam’s social-capital spillover mechanism with a direct-information alternative — connects to how media shape what citizens can know.
• QUESTION: Worth pursuing: does visceral media reduce all institutional trust, or only trust in lower-visibility officials?