I feel like this is kind of a one-sided essay - I think a balanced analysis of this situation has to include consideration of what these institutions may have done to lose people's trust. Institutions & the experts & others who populate them are not the same places or people that they used to be, and they don't act in entirely the same ways as they used to act.
Some of this is due to internet-induced changes in the media landscape - the primacy of speed and the possibility of minute-to-minute updating rather than daily (as with a newspaper) or hourly (with cable news) means that every incentive is to minimize fact-checking and editing in favor of getting a story out first. This means more minor & major mistakes and more little embarrassments that add up over time.
Many mainstream news sources have also branched out into "lighter" news written by not-quite-journalistic staff - that's fine when it's fluff pieces about shakshuka or a funny cat, but then the "activist fluff" started flowing fast & heavy. Even when there's no specific stance taken, there's this vague, "XYZ is the feminist/conservative hero we need right now" type of article that's short, fluffy, smarmy, and annoying to basically everyone but the kind of people who write things like that.
However I also do think there has been a change in the composition and nature of the class of people termed "experts." I don't think today's "experts" do nearly as good a job of arguing for & justifying their positions & their work as "experts" used to. There is a lot more specialization and there's a lot more separation of researchers from publicizers. There are also a lot more "fluffy experts" because what people study at universities has shifted toward ever-more-esoteric and narrowly-defined "fields of study" that are self-contained, to the point where "experts" in these fields are neither interested in nor capable of justifying their work or proving their purported expertise to laypeople.
As a basic example, let's consider an expert on history with a focus on art - the older kind of expert - compared to an expert on "art history", the newer kind of expert. The art-focused historian could tell you all sorts of historical details about art, artists, artworks, and art theory, but not only that, they can place these things into a historical context and show with specific examples why art is important to history, how art has affected history, and why understanding art is crucial to understanding humans & human history.
The narrow modern expert on "art history", meanwhile, may be able to tell you the same historical details & theories on art, but they don't have the broader expertise or worldliness required to explain cogently to laypeople why any of it matters - and more importantly, they don't see any need to do so. They study art because they already know art is important - and to them, everyone worth knowing knows that already, and anyone not already interested in art is a rube not worth engaging with.
It's a general issue with the "experts" of today. Being in their own corners of the internet, as most people are these days, they've forgotten that most other people are not "experts" - and consequently they've forgotten that it's necessary for experts to demonstrate & prove the value of their expertise regularly, publicly, and plainly in order to retain the regard of the general public. This has also allowed a lot of unqualified "false experts" to fit in seamlessly with credentialed experts - especially in fields ruled by numen like Psychology, anthropology, sociology, and various "cultural studies" morasses. These people really *shouldn't* be trusted, but it's very hard for a layperson to differentiate a false expert from a present-day credentialed expert, since what they say & do appears very similar if not identical for certain varieties of expert.
One cannot expect to be trusted forever on title & status alone - people start to suspect that the tiger is paper, and they can hardly be blamed since a lot of today's purported tigers really are paper. Experts need to do more to demonstrate their worth. Purported expert journalists need to be seen walking the street and putting the screws to people in real life, not writing essays from their home offices - anyone can do that. Purported experts on policy need to be seen debating & defending their assertions publicly, intelligently, cogently, coherently & accessibly. Likewise with every other purported expert - they will retain credibility & respect only in accordance with the extent to which they demonstrate genuine expertise in a way that the public can understand.
I was sure to note early on in the piece that our institutions have earned this distrust, and I reiterated that again in the conclusion for emphasis. I also linked to several previous articles I've written exploring the other end of this. Here are a few:
I feel like this is kind of a one-sided essay - I think a balanced analysis of this situation has to include consideration of what these institutions may have done to lose people's trust. Institutions & the experts & others who populate them are not the same places or people that they used to be, and they don't act in entirely the same ways as they used to act.
Some of this is due to internet-induced changes in the media landscape - the primacy of speed and the possibility of minute-to-minute updating rather than daily (as with a newspaper) or hourly (with cable news) means that every incentive is to minimize fact-checking and editing in favor of getting a story out first. This means more minor & major mistakes and more little embarrassments that add up over time.
Many mainstream news sources have also branched out into "lighter" news written by not-quite-journalistic staff - that's fine when it's fluff pieces about shakshuka or a funny cat, but then the "activist fluff" started flowing fast & heavy. Even when there's no specific stance taken, there's this vague, "XYZ is the feminist/conservative hero we need right now" type of article that's short, fluffy, smarmy, and annoying to basically everyone but the kind of people who write things like that.
However I also do think there has been a change in the composition and nature of the class of people termed "experts." I don't think today's "experts" do nearly as good a job of arguing for & justifying their positions & their work as "experts" used to. There is a lot more specialization and there's a lot more separation of researchers from publicizers. There are also a lot more "fluffy experts" because what people study at universities has shifted toward ever-more-esoteric and narrowly-defined "fields of study" that are self-contained, to the point where "experts" in these fields are neither interested in nor capable of justifying their work or proving their purported expertise to laypeople.
As a basic example, let's consider an expert on history with a focus on art - the older kind of expert - compared to an expert on "art history", the newer kind of expert. The art-focused historian could tell you all sorts of historical details about art, artists, artworks, and art theory, but not only that, they can place these things into a historical context and show with specific examples why art is important to history, how art has affected history, and why understanding art is crucial to understanding humans & human history.
The narrow modern expert on "art history", meanwhile, may be able to tell you the same historical details & theories on art, but they don't have the broader expertise or worldliness required to explain cogently to laypeople why any of it matters - and more importantly, they don't see any need to do so. They study art because they already know art is important - and to them, everyone worth knowing knows that already, and anyone not already interested in art is a rube not worth engaging with.
It's a general issue with the "experts" of today. Being in their own corners of the internet, as most people are these days, they've forgotten that most other people are not "experts" - and consequently they've forgotten that it's necessary for experts to demonstrate & prove the value of their expertise regularly, publicly, and plainly in order to retain the regard of the general public. This has also allowed a lot of unqualified "false experts" to fit in seamlessly with credentialed experts - especially in fields ruled by numen like Psychology, anthropology, sociology, and various "cultural studies" morasses. These people really *shouldn't* be trusted, but it's very hard for a layperson to differentiate a false expert from a present-day credentialed expert, since what they say & do appears very similar if not identical for certain varieties of expert.
One cannot expect to be trusted forever on title & status alone - people start to suspect that the tiger is paper, and they can hardly be blamed since a lot of today's purported tigers really are paper. Experts need to do more to demonstrate their worth. Purported expert journalists need to be seen walking the street and putting the screws to people in real life, not writing essays from their home offices - anyone can do that. Purported experts on policy need to be seen debating & defending their assertions publicly, intelligently, cogently, coherently & accessibly. Likewise with every other purported expert - they will retain credibility & respect only in accordance with the extent to which they demonstrate genuine expertise in a way that the public can understand.
I was sure to note early on in the piece that our institutions have earned this distrust, and I reiterated that again in the conclusion for emphasis. I also linked to several previous articles I've written exploring the other end of this. Here are a few:
https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/our-inbred-betters
https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/fact-checking-has-become-a-partisan
https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/journalism-should-be-more-than-a
https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-a-broken-media