Television made citizens know too much to trust officials

Evidence

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

Category: Causal Relationships

Related

• Television eroded government trust through visceral imagery, not civic displacement (similarity 0.92)
• Declining civic participation weakens officials’ trustworthiness, not just citizens’ trust (similarity 0.86)
• Rising information about government behavior drives declining trust (similarity 0.84)
• Citizens cannot trust government because they lack knowledge of its trustworthiness (similarity 0.81)
• Declining trust in government stems from increased knowledge, not worsened performance (similarity 0.79)
• Generational replacement drives twice the civic decline television does (similarity 0.78)
• Government being trustworthy matters more than the public trusting it. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Citizens cannot trust government because they lack knowledge of its trustworthiness #contradicts (0.90) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 780
• Distrust of government is easier to ground rationally than trust #corroborates (0.80) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 761