In a world where fakery looks real, tribalism is sold as truth, and engagement pays the bills, who can you trust?
Recently, I wrote about the epistemic crisis that humanity faces. I wrote that when artificial intelligence makes true knowledge harder to discover and verify, and valuable information is lost in the noise of fake content designed to feed our dopamine cravings, “interpersonal trust relations once again become critical to our understanding of the world”.
The question of who you can trust, and more importantly, how you can tell, is worth a deeper look.
Government
You no longer trust the government. Good. That is the root of wisdom.
At the heart of classical liberal thought is the belief that government is at best a necessary evil that ought to be constrained.
As Thomas Sowell famously wrote: “When your response to everything that is wrong with the world is to say, ‘there ought to be a law,’ you are saying that you hold freedom very cheap.”
We might have been willing to trust the government if the government had a motive to be reliably fair and honest, and the ability to be effective and efficient. It has neither.
Even absent outright corruption, it has a motive to defend its own ideology, policies and actions, and to suppress popular challenges to its authority. And its abilities are exemplified by every civil service office and state-owned enterprise in the country; that is, they are woefully inadequate.
Governments command armed forces, print money, and write the rules by which the rest of us must live. Healthy scepticism toward such power is not cynicism; it is the only way a free society can remain so.
Big business
You no longer trust large corporations either. Excellent.
All business is motivated by profit, and that profit is at first premised on serving the needs and wants of customers, but the bigger a business gets, the less trustworthy it becomes.
Contrary to the populist caricature, the primary concern of large corporations is not to out-compete rivals in the marketplace for your patronage, but to capture the state.
The most lucrative investment a big company can make is not in a new factory, but in new regulations; rules that raise costs for smaller competitors, erect barriers to entry, and fortify their own incumbent position from assault by upstarts.
Every licensing regime, every compliance burden, every industry standard written into law – supposedly “to protect consumers” or “to level the playing field” – is actually a strategy to dig a moat around big business itself.
One should welcome free markets precisely because genuine competition disciplines the powerful; but what we have in much of the economy today is not a free market, but the opposite: a collusive nexus between big business and government that amounts to a protected cartel, dressed up as capitalism. (In South Africa, that nexus even has names: Nedlac, BUSA, BLSA, SADC-BC, BBC, NEASA, SACCI – all representing big business, whether or not that is in the public interest.)
Mainstream media
You no longer trust the mainstream media. Natural enough.
Most of it is owned by the same big businesses whose interests we just described, and its senior figures move in the same social, professional, and political circles as the politicians and regulators they are meant to scrutinise.
Note that the problem is not that wealthy people own newspapers. In a free society, they are entitled to. Political pressure from owners is an issue, but it has always been an issue.
The primary problem is also not media bias. The media is not a monolith. You can find media that caters to just about every political and socio-economic category in the country. Some are right-wing. Some are left-wing. Some are centrist. Some are aimed at wealthy elites. Some are aimed at ordinary wage slaves. Some are serious and analytical. Some are sensationalist and trashy.
On a grid, just as many publications lean left as lean right.
The key problem, as discussed before, is the financial pressure caused by the diversion of advertising revenue to tech platforms. Experienced senior staff have become too expensive for all but the largest papers, and as revenues have bled away, the Chinese wall between editorial and advertising sales has become ever more porous.
New media
So you turned to citizen journalism. Bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, Substackers – the scrappy independents who tell it like it is, circumventing the establishment’s gatekeepers. Great.
But wait. Venture capital has already arrived to gobble these up, too.
Billions are being spent to acquire the most popular channels, to sign exclusive deals with the biggest independent voices, and to quietly steer editorial content in directions that happen to align with the commercial and political interests of the new benefactors.
The insurgents of five years ago are the incumbents of today.
The corporate ownership that corrupted the legacy press is hard at work corrupting its replacement. The economic pressures that turned the mainstream media into purveyors of press releases and sponsored content are rapidly taking over the new media channels, too.
The audience metrics that dictate advertising rates are even more corrosive in the online space, where they produce targeting algorithms and content formulae that are designed to keep you engaged, not informed.
Rise of the machines
Very well, you say. Let the machines sort it out.
You ask an AI chatbot to fact-check the news, summarise the debate, and tell you who’s right and who’s wrong. Who hasn’t been second-guessed on X by some rando invoking @grok?
Congratulations. You have welcomed back your gatekeepers, and they are more powerful than ever.
AI systems are built and owned by a handful of extraordinarily wealthy firms.
Their outputs are shaped by training data you cannot inspect, by “guardrails” you did not agree to, and by system prompts you will never see. Every AI company has a finger on every one of their AI models – even the ones you run yourself.
The bias is not always sinister. Sometimes it merely reflects the norms of a particular professional class, or the laws of a particular country. Sometimes it is genuinely well-intended, in order to prevent AI chatbots from turning into Nazis overnight.
But it is bias, invisible and at scale, delivered in the calm, authoritative tone of a supposedly neutral oracle.
What now?
At this point the temptation is to despair, or worse, to retreat into the comforting echo chamber of whichever tribe flatters you most.
Resist both. The classical liberal tradition has never promised a world free of bias, or money, or power. It promises something more useful: the tools to navigate a world saturated with them without surrendering your individual liberty.
So, who can you trust?
Learn to recognise the working principles that good journalists have always understood, that bad journalists have always evaded, and that the reader is entitled to expect from anyone – legacy outlet or lone blogger – who asks for their attention.
These principles have not changed. They have often been violated, but they are more relevant than ever, and can still guide you to good journalism.
A classical liberal has a particular stake in these principles, because a free society depends on citizens being able to form their own judgements from reliable information.
Principles of trust: news
When you read news, assess to what extent an article reflects the basic principles designed to ensure news is accurate, fair, and as objective as is reasonably possible.
The first principle is the primacy of primary sources. A serious journalist reads the bill, not a news article about the bill. They read the court ruling, not the press release celebrating or condemning it. They pull the dataset, not the infographic someone put on social media. They read the research paper (and others like it), and not just the abstract.
Every layer of interpretation between the reader and the underlying reality is an opportunity for error, distortion, or surreptitious editorialising. The honest reporter minimises those layers, or shows their work where they could not be eliminated. When a claim is made, the reader should be able to follow the chain of authority to the source.
The second is the distinction between what is known, what is reported, and what is inferred. A direct quotation from a named official is one kind of fact. An anonymous briefing from “sources familiar with the matter” is another, weaker kind. An analyst’s interpretation of events is a third, weaker still.
Good journalism keeps these categories visible to the reader. Bad journalism blends them into authoritative-sounding prose that disguises speculation as reporting.
Whenever you read a news article, ask yourself: which sentences here are facts, which are claims by interested parties, and which are the reporter’s own judgements? If you cannot tell, the reporter has failed you.
The third is the naming of sources wherever possible, and a justification of anonymity where it is not. Anonymous sources have their place. Whistleblowers need protection, and some stories of genuine public importance could not otherwise be told. But anonymity should be the narrow exception, granted only when the information is significant, corroborated, and unobtainable by other means.
The reader should be told, at least in general terms, why the source cannot be named and what interest they might have in the story. The lazy use of anonymous sourcing – the “officials said” fluff that pads out half of modern political journalism – is a form of cowardice that lets reporters make claims nobody can be held to.
The fourth is independent verification. A claim made by one source is a lead, not a story. Before a fact is published, it should be confirmed by at least one additional source, and ideally by documentary evidence.
This is laborious, and the economics of the modern news cycle punish those who do it, which is precisely why it has become one of the clearest markers of a serious outlet. Speed is the enemy of accuracy, and the reader who values being correctly informed over being first informed should reward those who take the time.
The fifth is transparent correction. Every journalist will get things wrong. What distinguishes the trustworthy from the rest is what happens next. A clear, prominent, dated correction that acknowledges the error and explains it is a mark of institutional integrity. A silent edit, a memory-holed article, or a weaselly “clarification” that refuses to admit what was wrong is a mark of its absence.
Watch what an outlet does with its mistakes; it tells you more than any mission statement ever will.
The sixth is steelmanning the other side. A reporter covering a contested question should be able to state the strongest version of each side’s case in terms its proponents would recognise.
If the piece only quotes one side’s best arguments and the other side’s worst, the reader is being led by the nose. This applies with special force to stories where the reporter’s own professional and social milieu has a clear view; that is precisely where the discipline of fair representation matters most.
Principles of trust: opinion
Opinion writing operates under different rules from news reporting, but those rules are no less strict.
The opinion columnist – like yours truly – does not pretend to be neutral. The columnist’s bargain with the reader is different: I will tell you what I think, I will tell you why I think it, and as far as I reasonably can, I will give you what you need to disagree intelligently with the substance of my arguments.
That bargain has its own principles.
The first is the disclosure of interests and priors. A column advocating a policy position should make clear where the writer is coming from. If I write in defence of free markets, you should know that I work for a classical liberal think tank, and you should factor that into your reading.
Trust people whose biases and interests are disclosed upfront. Everyone has a worldview; the honest ones tell you what theirs is. Be wary of anyone claiming to have none.
Trust writers who do not profit from telling you only what you want to hear. The business model matters. A writer funded by readers who value being challenged is in a different position from one funded by advertising that pays only for engagement. Someone who earns a salary or flat fee for their writing is implicitly more trustworthy than someone who writes for free but has a day job or consults for private clients.
If a columnist has a personal relationship with a figure in the story, or a long-held ideological commitment that bears on their argument, the reader is entitled to know.
The columnist who pretends to arrive at each question fresh and unencumbered is either self-deceived or trying to deceive you.
The second is the factual grounding of the argument. Opinion is not a licence to invent. The claims on which an argument rests, the statistics, the historical examples, the characterisations of what someone said or did, must be as rigorously sourced as any news report.
A columnist who bends facts or cherry-picks evidence to fit a thesis has forfeited the authority that makes the thesis worth reading. The opinion is the writer’s own; but the facts should reflect reality, and not be up for negotiation.
The third is the honest representation of the opposing view. If I am arguing against a position, I owe my reader an accurate account of what the people who hold that position actually believe and why. Attacking a caricature is rhetorically easy, but intellectually worthless.
The reader learns nothing from watching a strawman burn, and the writer who traffics in strawmen is telling you, whether they know it or not, that they cannot win the real argument.
The fourth is the acknowledgment of counter-evidence. Every serious argument has weaknesses, points at which the facts are awkward, cases that do not fit the thesis, considerations that cut the other way.
An honest columnist tries to name these and explain why they do not change the overall conclusion. A dishonest one hides them and hopes the reader will not notice. Over time, the habit of intellectual honesty is visible in the prose; so is its absence.
The fifth is the distinction between argument and assertion. To argue is to give reasons; to assert is merely to state.
Opinion journalism at its worst is a parade of assertions, dressed up in confident prose, that invites the reader to agree because the writer sounds sure, rather than because the reasoning is sound. A well-founded column should have structure: the reader should be able to trace the steps from premises to conclusion and, if they disagree, to identify precisely where the writer went off the rails.
The sixth is restraint about motive. It is tempting, and often lazy, to explain a political opponent’s position by impugning their character. They are corrupt, stupid, captured, racist, woke, unpatriotic – pick your epithet.
Sometimes these charges are true and must be made, with evidence. More often they are a substitute for engagement with the actual argument. A columnist who routinely explains disagreement by moral defect is not analysing the argument. The reader who applauds is no more than a part of a tribal mob being whipped up, instead of coming away from the article wiser and better informed.
Trust yourself
And finally, trust yourself, but only after you have done the work. None of this removes the burden from you. The reader in a free society is not a passive consumer of pre-digested truth; they are the last line of quality control.
Read widely, including people you find irritating. Read deeply, too. Do more than just skimming headlines or watching shorts. On topics that matter to you, read books, watch documentaries, and ponder long-form journalism.
Always be prepared to have your mind changed. I have found that my views on a topic evolve and become more sharply focused – and sometimes change altogether – the more I immerse myself in a subject.
When Julius Malema describes his movement as “Fanonist”, do you know what that means, specifically? Who was Franz Fanon, when and where did he live, how does he differ from Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels or Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and how might Fanon’s writings apply to modern South Africa?
You cannot denounce Malema as a commie or a neo-fascist demagogue until you’ve actually read what he has read, and understood his actual thinking.
Notice when a claim flatters your prior beliefs, and if it does, subject it to extra scrutiny, not less. Keep a mental note of who has been right and who has been wrong, and update their “reputation” in the back of your head accordingly.
Trust, but verify
A free society does not run on trust; it runs on the right to verify.
The governments cannot be trusted; the media institutions have failed, the insurgents are being bought, and the algorithms are quietly making up your mind for you.
But none of this is new. The principles of good journalism were devised to overcome exactly these problems in the past. Learn to recognise them, and use them to figure out who you can and cannot trust.
What is new is the speed at which information is delivered, which leaves less time than ever to immerse oneself in a topic, to understand it, and to verify one’s sources.
But what is also new is that the tools to access the primary sources, to compare accounts, to triangulate toward the truth, are more available to the ordinary citizen than at any point in human history.
It used to be extraordinarily hard to verify primary sources.
Academic papers were available in university libraries. The text of bills and acts were available in the city hall. Audio or video recordings of speeches were available in the archives of media houses. Yesterday’s news articles were available in the bottom of the bird cage.
Today, it is easier than ever to find primary sources (or at least high-quality secondary sources) and verify claims. The gatekeepers might be everywhere, but so are the gates around them. Use them.
The principles above are not a guarantee of truth. No such guarantee exists, in journalism or anywhere else.
They are something more modest and more valuable: a set of habits that, consistently practised, make honest error detectable and dishonest error expensive.
Readers who learn to recognise them, and writers who submit to them, are the two halves of the arrangement on which a free press, and therefore a free society, depends.
[Image: The office of Drum Magazine in Johannesburg, ca. 1945, South African History Online, colourised and upscaled by ChatGPT]:
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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