"Who do you trust?"

Good question!

Here are some of Joel Achenbach's answers:

Google and Wikipedia are pretty good, but they're just starting points in the quest to find out what's going on....

I trust nature, resilient and resourceful as it has shown itself to be for some 4 billion years in these parts.

I trust the scientific method, for being so relentlessly self-correcting, and for having the courage to view truth as provisional.

I trust the future. Could be foolish. But trust always has an element of faith. I trust the future to give us a better world. (Cross my fingers.)

Achenbach picked up the "Who do you trust?" meme from this nicely short Washington Post piece, in which Philip Kennicott asks the same question in the wake of the death of Walter Cronkite. Kennicott writes:

It was deeply disturbing, but not terribly surprising, to learn that under the guidance of a stern man in a lab coat, ordinary people would torture innocent victims in the infamous Milgram experiment carried out at Yale University. Cronkite was a white man in a tie, with a calm, reassuring voice, and he could have talked us into almost anything, if he wanted to. But his legacy is a paradox: We trusted him to teach us to trust less.

The nostalgia for Cronkite is nostalgia not for a lost golden age, but for a brief time when three large media corporations held a monopoly on the airwaves, when trust could be sorted out easily and quickly with the shorthand of race, class and education....

But there is no aura of trust that public figures can put on like a bespoke suit. Trust has been shattered into a million little pieces, which was, perversely, the name of a dubious memoir endorsed by Oprah, unofficially the most trusted woman in America. Replacing it is a host of smaller and more precise ideas. Transparency. Authenticity. Accuracy. A different world, and not necessarily a worse one.

(Photo of Encyclopedia Brittanica by Stewart Butterfield.)