Questions we all should be asking ourselves about trust

I write often about trust in this column. It is the foundation of a newspaper’s relationship with its readers, and it is the foundation of a government’s relationship with its people. But my theme today is not so much to encourage you to trust the Daily Herald or any particular news agency — indeed, my consistent theme related to the media is Ronald Reagan’s famous maxim regarding the best approach to foreign treaties, “Trust but verify.”

Rather, I’d like us to explore and, all of us, to question why we trust whatever it is that we trust.

That inquiry has the potential to make us uncomfortable. For, I suspect that a compelling truth for most people is that on controversial subjects, we trust what we trust, first, because we want to trust it and, only after that, because we can’t deny what we don’t want to believe.

This observation occurs to me in numerous contexts these days. Partisans frequently rip into legacy news media because they don’t see stories they hear or read on websites or agencies whose reporting more closely aligns with their beliefs. Partisans of a different stripe rip into the stories on those websites and agencies with equal vigor and often for the same reason.

It is not true that all media are equally untrustworthy; some clearly and unambiguously promote a certain political or social agenda. But it is true that all media fall short of the perhaps unachievable goal of perfect balance, of utterly dispassionate objectivity. So, as it pertains to a news source, if we are to consider ourselves thoughtfully and honestly informed about the issues of the day, we ought to constantly be asking ourselves, “Why do I trust what I’m reading and hearing” and “Have I honestly considered additional or different information from other sources?”

It is not the media, per se, though, that draws me to this line of discussion. It is government.

Immediately upon his inauguration, President Trump issued pardons for nearly 1,500 individuals convicted of crimes ranging from rioting and assault on officers of the law to outright sedition. His argument? The charges against these people were rooted in political partisanship, never mind that their convictions were handed down by juries and courts following centuries-old rules and guidelines intended to uphold the basic values and democratically established laws of the country.

Lest we rush too quickly to criticize, though, we cannot ignore the truth that I know many of you already are leaping to your feet to scream out. Former President Joe Biden just did virtually the same thing for virtually the same reason. He pardoned his son for crimes of which he had been convicted, he pardoned nearly 2,500 people convicted of non-violent drug crimes and he pre-emptively pardoned members of his family and other politicians whom he feared would be targeted by a “weaponized” justice system.

The two wrongs do not make a right, of course, so partisans are quick to produce justifications showing how the circumstances of the case they support are different. I’m not here to argue those distinctions. The simple fact is that, except in the cases of pre-emptive pardons intended as an end-run around the justice system, the other pardons and commutations involved people whose cases were adjudicated according to long-established systems of justice. So we as citizens have a serious question to ask ourselves. Do we trust our justice system or not?

As it relates to pardons, the Daily Herald’s position has long been that we do not trust the pardon authority given to presidents and it ought to be revised. And the reason for our misgivings is precisely the impact of that authority on the people’s trust of our justice system.

Achieving that level of systemic change, however, is not going to occur quickly, if at all. What we individuals can do in the meantime is recognize that if we trust the system only when its outcomes side with our own opinions, we should be asking ourselves some hard questions about our own values of trust.

When we do that, if we’re honest with ourselves, we will find there are many other ways in which our trust is based more on emotion than studious examination. To the degree that that applies to our preference of news sources, those agencies that most deserve your trust — among which the Daily Herald hopes to find itself — are those that realize they should not and cannot dispense with the former but ever strive to uphold the primacy of the latter.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on X at @JimSlusher. His new book “Conversations, community and the role of the local newspaper” is available at eckhartzpress.com.