As a result of these abhorrent views of his, I’m cancelling my credit card and bank account with Tangerine, owned by Scotiabank.

Imagine being so bereft of ethics and honor to communicate deliberate deceit like this to the public.

Still, it is relatively easy to measure an unsurprising freefall in trust and provide facile conclusions. More difficult is candid counsel for cautious clients and insightful illumination of benefit to broad public constituencies as they assess what they can do to help change things for the better.

I hope that more PR industry voices will be heard in a chorus of confident communication concerning such matters going forward. The Trust Barometer is a landmark study and a tremendous achievement for the leading PR firm that publishes it.

PR leaders have been mostly MIA in providing serious commentary about the drivers of change now confronting the world, including: geopolitical chaos, economic uncertainty, rising inequality, toxic disinformation, pervasive propaganda, algorithmic manipulation, media ownership, AI ethics, etc.

Measuring trust is a useful conversation-starter for marketing a firm, but we need to have more courageous conversations about the structural forces eroding public faith in the first place, and whether communicators are helping leaders confront those, or merely enabling them by managing the optics.