From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Welcome to the Wall Street Journal's Free Expression podcast. I'm Paul Giego, editor of the Wall

Street Journal editorial page. I'm filling in for Jerry Baker, who's the usual host of Free

Expression, because today Jerry is on the other side

of the microphone. I'm interviewing Jerry about his new book, American Breakdown, Why We No Longer

Trust Our Leaders and Institutions and how we can rebuild confidence. Jerry, welcome.

Thank you very much indeed for having me, Paul. Congratulations on the book.

Very kind of. Thank you for all your forbearance and help in helping me get it done.

First, let me ask you why you decided to write this book and why the decline of trust in institutions matters.

Like you, Paul, I've been a journalist for several decades and most of that time here in the United States.

I've been here, journalists in the US for almost 30 years.

And as a reporter, as a writer, as an editor, you don't need a particularly brilliant qualities of perception to realize that people's trust in the media's declined dramatically.

Now, I think here at the Wall Street Journal,

we've managed to essentially maintain high levels of trust with readers, but you look across the media landscape, as I have over the last 25, 30 years, and all of these major media institutions

that people, generally speaking, we always knew that nothing was ever perfect and some media

organisations had particular biases. But by and large, 30, 40 years ago, these institutions were broadly trusted to, at least at least that their sense that their objective was to try and get to the truth and tell the story. But your book really isn't just about the media. It's about many institutions. Yeah, exactly. So that's how it started out. I thought, I don't want to write yet another book about the media. But I looked at these numbers and then, as it turns out, of course, the Gallup organization and other organizations have been tracking Americans' trust in major institutions, the media being one of them, but in Gallup's case, across 16 institutions, government, law enforcement, big business, science and technology, small business, the military, you know, pretty well all the major institutions that make up American society. And in almost all of those cases, this is what then struck me as I went through the data, in almost all of those cases over the last 30 years or so, trust has not just declined. I mean, we're talking about, we're not talking, you know, a few percentage points. Trust in many cases has fallen by more than half the media is the extreme case, but education, higher education, law enforcement, science and technology, big business.

And so I thought, you know, I wanted to get to the bottom of this to try and understand what was going on, understand the particular causes of the collapse in trust in each of those institutions, but also to see if there was a broader explanation for this widespread loss of trust. And why does trust matter was your second question? Societies can't function without trust. If we don't trust each other. Especially democracies. Perfect example is an election, right? If you don't trust the outcome of an election, a very relevant and topical issue that I know grips many Americans right now, then you can't trust the government because you don't think the government was legitimately elected and therefore that government has no legitimacy

and that leads to all kinds of terrible things. So trust is absolutely essential.

And trust is the Greece in many ways of society. It allows you to function without having

coercion because it's like an economic transaction. But then it's spread out across the entire society

where you make a handshake with somebody, not only in a contractual sense, but just saying,

I trust the fact that my pastor is telling me the truth. Yeah, yeah. I trust the fact that that

...