I’m increasingly appreciating that one of the side-benefits of being a TS permablogger is that it provides a nice place to park my graphs and insights that don’t make it through the editors with my other work. On that note, my draft of a recent Deseret News article of mine was built around this graph. I have no idea why they decided to cut it.

But seriously, I knew they’d have to pare it down, but I thought the graphics guys would make the choice about which lines to keep or throw, but they ended up just throwing out the whole thing–it was probably way too cluttered to be salvageable. The topline reported in the article is:

At that time, only about 15% of Americans had hardly any confidence in the press, with only 22% having that same low amount of confidence in television (about the same as religion, it is worth noting).

Now? Their tumble has been much faster and harder than religion. While about one-third of Americans now have hardly any confidence in religion, about half of Americans have hardly any confidence in the press (55%) or television (48%).

If you squint hard enough at the graph you’ll see that. 

• The main exception to cratering confidence is organized labor, which is so small and powerless in 2025 I suspect that had more to do with their perceived glory years of yesteryear more than any current interactions with them. 

 

• Concerns about COVID breaking our confidence in medicine notwithstanding, it looks like medicine and science both enjoy high confidence without a significant trendline in the opposite direction. 

 

• But the vast majority of other institutions: academia, the government, business, media, and, yes, religion, all have cratering confidence levels. We are generically much more cynical than we were. Anecdotally, it seems like when people point out that religion doesn’t enjoy the confidence it used to it’s taken as some sort of a gotcha that by definition shows how problematic religion has been or acted. However, some of those same people turn around and assume out that declining confidence in, say, academia or the media as our arbiters of truth is a sign of intellectual stagnation or decadence when you could just as rightfully diagnose declining confidence those institutions to their own shortcomings and scandals.