COMMENTARY: Media in crisis — when disinformation kills democracy more surely than bombs

The numbers that should wake us up

In 2026, the Reuters Institute published a figure that should have triggered emergency sessions in every democratic parliament on the planet: global trust in media has fallen to 37% — the lowest level ever recorded since tracking began in 2015. That's a three-point drop in a single year. Three points that represent millions of citizens who have definitively turned their backs on the news, on fact-checking, on verified journalism. Three points that represent a democracy quietly bleeding out.

This isn't a temporary crisis. It isn't a mood. It isn't a reaction to a specific scandal. It's a structural collapse, methodical and accelerating, driven by forces that are simultaneously technological, political, economic and geopolitical. The Edelman Trust Barometer 2026 calls it a "grievance crisis" — not just distrust, but active resentment. Citizens aren't simply indifferent to the media. Many of them despise it. And that hatred is being deliberately cultivated by actors whose interest lies in a world without shared facts.

From a trust crisis to a governance crisis

When trust collapses, it doesn't stay contained to the media sphere. It spreads. Distrust of media feeds distrust of science. Distrust of science feeds distrust of institutions. Distrust of institutions feeds distrust of democracy itself. This is the chain reaction we are now living through — and its speed is accelerating. The World Economic Forum identified disinformation as the number one global risk for 2026, ahead of climate change and armed conflict. That's not hyperbole. It's an observation from the field.

The Liberties 2026 Media Freedom Report is even more specific: among 22 European Union member states studied, only 3 countries maintain a high level of public trust in their media. Three. Out of twenty-two. That means the overwhelming majority of EU democracies are already operating in an environment of structural distrust — an environment that authoritarian actors, whether Russian, Chinese or domestic populist, exploit with methodical precision.

I'm a journalist and columnist. This figure of 37% of global trust touches me personally — not as a statistic, but as a diagnosis. It means that for every three people who read me, roughly two are reading me with an ambient suspicion, a background noise of doubt. I have to earn each sentence. That's not a complaint — that's a reminder that credibility isn't a status, it's a daily practice. And days when I'm not rigorous enough, that suspicion is entirely legitimate.

Digital fracture and disintermediation

To understand the current crisis, we have to go back to the early 2010s. The transition to digital didn't just change how journalism was distributed — it dismantled the entire trust architecture that had been built over a century. Traditional media were gatekeepers. Not perfect ones, far from it. But they held a filtering function: editorial hierarchy, fact-checking protocols, legal accountability, established reputations. When social networks arrived as the primary vector of information, that architecture was swept aside. Suddenly, a verified article and a fabricated rumor had the same visual format, the same algorithmic distribution, the same apparent credibility.

Disintermediation — the disappearance of the intermediary between source and audience — has been a double-edged revolution. It has democratized the production of information, giving voice to actors who were previously excluded from the public arena. But it has also opened the floodgates to industrial-scale disinformation. There is no longer a professional code, no legal framework, no social accountability to stop a false claim from reaching ten million people in six hours. The infrastructure of truth has been privatized by platforms that have no interest in investing in it.

The real errors of legacy media

It would be dishonest, however, to place all the blame on platforms. Legacy media — television networks, major newspapers, public radio — have committed real and serious errors over the past two decades. Iraq 2003: large media outlets relayed government claims about weapons of mass destruction without applying even the most basic critical filters. COVID-19: some outlets published contradictory, confusing, sometimes frankly irresponsible information in the first months of the pandemic. The 2016 US election: coverage so obsessively centered on Donald Trump that it gave him billions in free media attention while neglecting the structural issues he was exploiting.

These failures are real. They have consequences. They have fed legitimate doubt. The problem is that legitimate doubt has been weaponized by actors who have an interest in generalized nihilism — the idea that everyone lies, that truth doesn't exist, that all sources are equivalent. This nihilism is infinitely more dangerous than any specific media error. Because a correctable error allows correction. Nihilism allows nothing.

I'm not going to pretend the media are perfect and that distrust is totally unjustified. That would be dishonest — and dishonesty is precisely what feeds the crisis. But there is a fundamental difference between rigorous media criticism and the systematic destruction of the very concept of shared information. One strengthens democracy. The other dismantles it. I choose the first. Every day, consciously.

Russia, Iran, China: architects of informational chaos

The global media trust crisis is not purely spontaneous. It is partially engineered. Russia has built since the early 2010s an industrial disinformation infrastructure — RT, Sputnik, the Internet Research Agency troll factory, covert influence networks on every major social platform — explicitly designed to sow doubt, deepen social divisions and delegitimize Western media. The objective isn't to make people believe Russian propaganda. It's to make people believe nothing at all. To reach a state of generalized distrust where citizens no longer have the cognitive tools to distinguish true from false.

Iran and China operate differently but with comparable aims. China focuses on narrative control — reframing its own actions, suppressing coverage of Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan — while deploying influence networks on X/Twitter, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook. Iran concentrates its efforts on specific target populations — Arab diaspora, progressive activist networks, anti-war movements — with surgical messaging designed to amplify existing fractures. These are sophisticated, well-funded operations. And they are working.

The role of algorithms: unwitting accomplices

But the most powerful amplifier of disinformation isn't Russian or Chinese — it's American. Meta, X/Twitter, YouTube and TikTok have built recommendation systems optimized for engagement — meaning for emotional reaction, not for truth. The MIT study that showed disinformation spreads 6 times faster than accurate information on social networks isn't an anomaly. It's the logical product of these systems. Outrage, fear and moral contempt generate more clicks than nuanced, verified information. Algorithms don't know the difference between true and false. They know engagement.

This structural bias has created a media ecosystem where the most extreme, most emotionally charged, most divisive voices receive the most amplification — regardless of their relation to reality. A state actor who wants to undermine trust in a democracy no longer needs to pay for advertising. They simply need to produce content that triggers algorithmic amplification. The platforms do the work for free. And they have done so for years with full awareness of the consequences.

There is no algorithmic neutrality. There never was. Saying a platform is "just a distribution tool" is like saying a loaded weapon is just a piece of metal. The design of recommendation systems is a political choice — one that has been made for a decade in favor of engagement over truth, without any democratic accountability. That must change. Not in five years. Now.

The Liberties 2026 report: only 3 countries out of 22 with high trust

The Liberties 2026 Media Freedom Report paints a picture that is alarming in its precision. Among the 22 EU member states studied, the vast majority of populations no longer trust their media. In several countries — particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, where populist governments have systematically undermined press independence — distrust has become the norm. Hungary and Poland (before its recent political transition) have been laboratories for what organized destruction of media independence looks like: regulatory capture, advertising pressure, legal harassment, nationalist narrative about "foreign media."

But the crisis isn't limited to these countries. Even in France, Spain, Italy and Belgium, trust in media has fallen below 40%. The reasons are complex: media concentration, perceived proximity between media owners and political or economic power, coverage seen as too partisan, too Parisian, too detached from the daily realities of ordinary citizens. There is a real social geography of distrust: metropolitan vs. rural, educated vs. working class, young vs. old. And each of these fractures is a leverage point for actors who want to deepen them.

Germany and the UK: models under pressure

The cases of Germany and the United Kingdom are particularly instructive because they represent opposite models under similar pressure. In Germany, the AfD has made systematic attacks on ARD and ZDF public broadcasters a central element of its political platform, calling them "Systemmedien" — system media — a term designed to cast journalism as an instrument of an elite conspiracy. This strategy has borne fruit: distrust of public media has grown significantly in AfD-sympathizing demographics.

In the UK, the BBC — historically one of the most trusted institutions in the world — finds itself in an existential crisis. Accused of left-wing bias by conservatives, of right-wing bias by progressives, of British imperialism bias by postcolonial critics, the BBC struggles to maintain a neutrality that its detractors have deliberately made impossible. This "neutrality trap" is a classic mechanism: when every political actor defines the truth as "what favors my camp," a media that tries to report rigorously will inevitably be accused of bias by all sides simultaneously.

When populist parties attack the media, they do two things simultaneously: they protect themselves from scrutiny — because a press that lacks credibility can no longer hold power accountable — and they build a constituency of permanent distrust that is extremely useful for mobilizing against "elites." It is a double-edged political strategy of rare effectiveness. And democracies have been appallingly slow to understand it and respond to it.

25% trust: a democracy that mistrusts its own informers

The United States occupies a very specific place in this global crisis. With only 25% trust in media — an absolute historic low — American democracy is operating in an informational environment that would have been unimaginable thirty years ago. This collapse hasn't happened in a vacuum: it's the product of a decades-long conservative project to delegitimize media perceived as too liberal, accelerated by the emergence of an alternative media ecosystem — Fox News, then a galaxy of partisan websites, podcasts and social accounts — and radicalized by the political figure of Donald Trump, who has made attacking "fake news" media a centerpiece of his political identity.

The consequences of this collapse are concrete and measurable. A significant fraction of the American population now lives in completely separate informational universes — parallel realities where the same events receive diametrically opposed interpretations, where shared facts capable of grounding democratic deliberation barely exist. Elections, vaccines, climate, immigration, trade policy: on each of these issues, a portion of the population receives information so filtered, so decontextualized, so partisan that constructive political dialogue has become practically impossible.

The geopolitical consequences of American informational disorientation

This crisis has direct geopolitical consequences — for Ukraine, for NATO, for global security. An American public partly persuaded that mainstream media systematically lies is also a public that is harder to mobilize around complex international commitments. Support for Ukraine, which requires understanding of history, geopolitics and the long-term stakes of European security, cannot survive in an environment of complete informational atomization. Russia has understood this perfectly. Undermining trust in Western media is a direct investment in weakening Western ability to sustain collective action.

The Biden administration's decision — then confirmed by the Trump administration in its own way — to allow disinformation to flourish on social platforms under cover of free speech absolutism has had international repercussions that are difficult to measure but impossible to ignore. When the informational environment of the world's largest democracy becomes dysfunctional, every democracy in its orbit becomes more vulnerable. The information war has no borders. And right now, the side that understands this best is not ours.

I think of Ukraine when I read these trust figures. Ukrainian society, under fire, has paradoxically maintained high trust in its own media — because those media are fighting for survival, because their credibility is linked to the survival of the nation itself. There is a bitter lesson there for Western democracies that take press freedom for granted: freedom is not self-maintaining. It demands active investment, constant vigilance and civic courage. We are lacking in all three.

Finland as a model to study seriously

Not all countries are equally vulnerable to disinformation. Finland consistently ranks among the most media-literate populations in the world — with a trust level of 69% according to the Media Literacy Index 2026 — and that's not an accident. Since the 1990s, Finland has integrated media education into its national curriculum, not as an optional subject but as a core competency, as fundamental as mathematics or reading. Finnish students learn to identify sources, assess credibility, recognize the rhetorical structures of disinformation, understand how algorithms work. And they learn this with a very specific geopolitical context in mind: they share a 1,340-kilometer border with Russia.

The Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania — have followed a similar path, integrating media literacy into their educational curricula specifically in response to Russian influence operations they have experienced directly since their independence. These countries understand viscerally what it means to have your information space invaded. Their experience has lessons for all of Western Europe — which has too often had the luxury of treating disinformation as an abstract threat rather than an existential reality.

Educating for truth: a democratic investment, not optional

The Finnish model is exportable. It requires political will, sustained funding, and genuine pedagogical integration — not a one-hour workshop bolted on to an existing curriculum, but a real systemic transformation of how we teach critical thinking, source evaluation, and informational self-defense. Media literacy must be understood not as a technical skill but as a democratic competency — as fundamental as the right to vote for the health of a democracy.

The returns on this investment are demonstrable. Studies in countries that have implemented robust media literacy programs show measurable reductions in susceptibility to disinformation, increases in source verification behaviors, and — most importantly — greater resilience to the emotional manipulation techniques used by both state actors and commercial platforms. This isn't idealism. It's evidence-based policy. And it's one of the few interventions that strengthens democratic resistance without requiring restrictions on freedom of expression.

Media literacy is not a luxury. It's the cognitive equivalent of vaccination — individual protection that produces collective herd immunity. Just as a population that has never been exposed to a disease has no natural defenses against it, a population that has never been taught to evaluate information has no natural defenses against disinformation. And just as we don't leave vaccination to individual choice when the entire community's health is at stake, we can't leave informational self-defense to chance. It's a state responsibility. A democratic duty.

Radical transparency as the only credible response

If media want to rebuild trust, they must start by acknowledging something many of them resist: the crisis of trust is not solely the fault of platforms and bad actors. It's also the product of real failures, of missed corrections, of opacity about editorial processes and financial interests that have fed perfectly legitimate doubts. Rebuilding trust requires a movement toward radical transparency — not as a slogan, but as an operational practice. Transparency about ownership, about financing, about editorial decision-making processes, about errors and corrections, about journalists' conflicts of interest.

The Trust Project has developed a labeling initiative that goes in the right direction: clear indicators of editorial practices, easily accessible information about news organization funding, visible commitment to established journalistic standards. But this kind of initiative remains marginal — adopted by a minority of media outlets, invisible to the general public. Making these standards universal would require coordination between media, platforms and regulators that has not yet materialized at sufficient scale.

The business model: the crisis feeding the crisis

The economic model of digital media is itself a structural driver of the trust crisis. The collapse of traditional advertising, the rise of clickbait as the dominant metric, the pressure for volume over depth, the systematic cutting of investigative journalism teams to reduce costs — all of this has produced media that are financially fragile, editorially weaker and more dependent on immediate engagement than on long-term credibility. A media outlet that survives by maximizing clicks is a media outlet that has powerful incentives to prioritize outrage over rigor.

The transition to subscription models has been a partial solution — but only for media that already have a strong enough brand to monetize reader loyalty. For local and regional media, which are the foundation of democratic coverage of local power, the economic crisis is catastrophic. The United States has lost more than 2,500 local newspapers since 2005. These aren't just numbers — they represent thousands of city halls, school boards, local courts that are no longer covered. In these "news deserts", disinformation fills the vacuum.

I work in this field. I see the economic pressure from inside. I know what it's like when you have to choose between spending three weeks on an investigation that may not generate significant traffic, and producing fifteen quick articles that will be shared widely on social networks. These are not abstract choices. They have daily consequences on what gets published and what doesn't. Media reform isn't optional moralizing. It's a structural survival necessity for democratic journalism.

Deepfakes and the impossible truth

Artificial intelligence introduces a new and particularly destabilizing dimension to the media trust crisis. Deepfakes — hyper-realistic audio and video fabrications — have already been used in several documented cases to manipulate political processes: fake statements attributed to political leaders, fake videos of officials in compromising situations, fake news broadcasts mimicking legitimate media outlets. These tools are now accessible at low cost to virtually anyone with basic technical skills. The barrier to industrial production of sophisticated disinformation has practically disappeared.

The immediate consequence is a phenomenon researchers call "liar's dividend": in a world where deepfakes are possible, any real footage can be claimed to be a deepfake. Real evidence can be dismissed as fabrication. This creates an informational environment where nothing can be definitively proven — which is exactly the objective of actors who operate in bad faith. The uncertainty itself becomes a tool of manipulation. When everything can be doubted, nothing can be verified. And when nothing can be verified, power operates without accountability.

AI as a verification tool: the technological hope

But AI is also a potential solution — and this is what makes the situation so complex. The same technological capabilities that enable the production of deepfakes can be deployed to detect them. Automated verification tools, source cross-referencing systems, syntactic analysis algorithms capable of identifying the textual markers of disinformation — these tools already exist and are being actively developed. Organizations like Bellingcat have demonstrated how open-source digital investigation techniques — geolocation, satellite image analysis, social media archive verification — can produce rigorous journalism that would have been impossible just ten years ago.

The question is not whether these tools will exist. They already do. The question is who will have access to them and under what governance conditions. If AI verification tools remain the exclusive property of major platforms or well-funded media organizations, they will benefit only those who are already best equipped. If they are made accessible to independent media, civil society organizations and citizens themselves, they could constitute a real democratization of informational self-defense. The political choices made now about AI governance in the media sphere will have consequences that will play out for decades.

AI in journalism inspires a contradictory emotion in me — something between fascination and dread. It can do in minutes what would take me hours: cross-reference sources, identify temporal inconsistencies, detect textual patterns characteristic of disinformation. But it can also produce disinformation indistinguishable from a solid article. I'm not afraid of the technology itself. I'm afraid of the governance vacuum around it. Technology doesn't create ethics. People do. And right now, the people creating these tools are moving much faster than the institutions supposed to govern them.

Ukraine, Iran, Gaza: theaters of militarized information

Armed conflicts have always had their informational dimension — propaganda, censorship, counter-propaganda. But the current wars offer an unprecedented laboratory for understanding how the media trust crisis plays out in extreme situations. In Ukraine, Russia has waged a total information war from the first hours of the invasion: denial of war crimes, inversion of blame, systematic promotion of the narrative of NATO aggression. Bucha, where satellite evidence definitively documented war crimes, became a test case — and Russia's denial-and-fabrication response created a model replicated since in countless other contexts.

In Gaza, the extreme difficulty of access for independent journalists — combined with extreme social polarization of audiences — has produced an informational environment where verification has become both more critical and more difficult than ever. Both sides of the conflict accuse each other of systematic disinformation. The reality is that disinformation has been produced by multiple actors, in multiple directions, while journalists attempting to work rigorously on the ground face mortal dangers and institutional obstruction. The informational crisis and the human crisis feed each other in a spiral that is very difficult to interrupt.

War journalism in the era of drones and deepfakes

War journalism has always been one of the most dangerous and most important forms of journalism. In the era of drones, satellite imagery, and social media, it has undergone a radical transformation. On one hand, the availability of open-source information has never been greater: footage filmed by civilians, satellite images accessible to the public, troop movements trackable via commercial geolocation data. The Bellingcat model of digital war journalism — based on rigorous cross-referencing of open-source information — has demonstrated that highly credible investigations can be conducted from a laptop.

On the other hand, these same tools make fabrication and manipulation more sophisticated. The same drone that documents a reality can be used to produce staged or manipulated footage. The same satellite image analysis that establishes truth can be applied to images subtly altered to suggest false conclusions. War journalism in 2026 requires not only physical courage and editorial rigor, but also a technical mastery of verification tools that was not part of the journalistic toolkit just fifteen years ago. The profession has been transformed faster than the institutions that train and protect journalists.

Verification during wartime is one of the most difficult exercises in journalism. You're under time pressure. Emotional pressure. Access pressure. The human stakes are immense — a false claim about a military operation can cost lives. I have enormous respect for the war correspondents and digital investigators who do this work. Not because they are infallible — no one is. But because they maintain the practice of verification when everything pushes toward abandoning it. That discipline, under fire, is a form of daily heroism that doesn't get enough recognition.

The European DSA: a real advance with real limits

The Digital Services Act (DSA) is the most ambitious attempt to date to regulate the information space in democratic countries. Entering into force in 2023 and now fully implemented for platforms with more than 45 million users in the EU, the DSA imposes new obligations: algorithmic transparency, restrictions on targeting of minors, risk assessment reports for systemic content, reinforced procedures for removing illegal content. For the first time, major platforms face legally binding obligations in a democratic jurisdiction with real enforcement capacity.

The practical results are mixed but real. Meta, Google, TikTok and X/Twitter have all modified their practices — some more significantly than others — to comply with DSA requirements. Independent audits have identified deficiencies, and the European Commission has opened several formal investigations. But the gaps are also real: the DSA cannot regulate the content itself, only the systems that distribute it. It can impose transparency on algorithms, but cannot dictate what an algorithm must favor. It can require risk assessment reports, but cannot guarantee that risks identified in those reports will actually be addressed.

Self-regulation: necessary but insufficient

The media industry itself has developed self-regulatory mechanisms over decades — ethics committees, press councils, codes of conduct. These mechanisms have real value: they allow the profession to maintain standards without direct state intervention in editorial content. But they have demonstrated their limits in the current environment. They are voluntary, often toothless, and apply only to actors who choose to adhere to them. An independent blogger, a disinformation website, a foreign state-sponsored propaganda operation — none of them are subject to press councils.

The debate between regulation and self-regulation often proceeds as a false dichotomy. The realistic answer is a hybrid architecture: robust self-regulation for journalistic practice, reinforced state regulation for the distribution infrastructure — algorithms, advertising, platform architecture — and co-regulatory mechanisms for the spaces between. This architecture doesn't yet fully exist anywhere. Building it requires overcoming both the free-speech absolutism that has paralyzed American regulatory responses and the state censorship temptation that has compromised some European approaches.

I'm as wary of state regulation of truth as I am of a total absence of rules. The first leads to censorship. The second to informational anarchy. The answer isn't a compromise between two bad options — it's finding an entirely different architecture. One that protects editorial freedom absolutely while constraining the infrastructure of distribution. One where the state regulates the pipes without touching the water. It's technically complex. It's politically difficult. But it's the right problem to be solving. And too few people are solving it seriously.

Invest in media literacy at school

The first and most fundamental priority is systematic investment in media literacy throughout the educational system. Not as an optional activity or a pilot project, but as a core competency integrated from primary school through the end of secondary education. The Finnish model is the proof of concept. The Baltic model provides additional evidence in the specifically relevant context of exposure to Russian disinformation. The question is not whether this works — the evidence is clear. The question is whether there is sufficient political will to make the investment at the necessary scale and speed.

This investment must go beyond the simple detection of fake news. It must encompass an understanding of how recommendation algorithms work, how advertising financing influences editorial content, how to evaluate the credibility of a source not by its brand but by its methods, how to distinguish fact from opinion from inference. These are not technical skills — they are citizenship skills, as fundamental to democratic participation as the ability to read a ballot.

Fund local and independent journalism

The second priority is to address the collapse of local and independent journalism as a public policy emergency. This means finding financing models that don't depend solely on the market — because the market has demonstrably failed to maintain the journalism democracies need. Several models are being tested: public journalism funds at arm's length from government, tax credits for subscriptions to recognized local media, mandatory platform contributions to journalism funds in exchange for the right to distribute media content. Each model has its risks. None is perfect. But allowing news deserts to continue expanding is worse than any imperfect solution.

The key principle is institutional independence: public financing must not mean government control of editorial content. Countries like Norway, Sweden and Finland have maintained sophisticated public support systems for press diversity without crossing into editorial interference. These models are not transferable without adaptation — but they demonstrate that the tension between public funding and editorial independence is manageable with the right institutional architecture.

I grew up in an era when every city had its newspaper. When local political life was covered. When city councilors knew they would be held accountable for their decisions. When that coverage disappeared — absorbed by media concentration, killed by the collapse of print advertising — something irreplaceable was lost. Not just information. A whole practice of democratic accountability at the local level. Rebuilding it requires the same civic commitment we'd apply to rebuilding a destroyed bridge. Because the consequences of its absence are just as concrete.

Irresponsible sharing: when we become disinformation vectors

Structural solutions are necessary. But they are not sufficient. Because the information ecosystem is not just made of institutions, platforms and states — it's made of hundreds of millions of individual choices made every day, minute by minute. Every time a user shares an article without reading it, every time they spread a compelling rumor without checking its source, every time they prefer the emotionally satisfying story to the more nuanced but more accurate one — they make a choice that has consequences on the shared informational environment.

Research on sharing behavior on social networks reveals systematic patterns: 59% of shared links on social media are shared without the article having been read. That's a majority of shared information shared without the most basic quality check — has the person actually read what they're amplifying? In this context, individual responsibility isn't a moralizing lecture. It's a recognition that the information ecosystem is made of our individual behaviors, aggregated. And that changing those behaviors at scale is as important as any platform regulation or government policy.

Rebuilding trust: a transaction, not a declaration

Rebuilding trust between citizens and media cannot be achieved by decree or communication campaign. It's a transaction — a series of concrete exchanges where media demonstrate rigor, correct their errors visibly, open their processes to scrutiny, and earn back credibility through consistent behavior over time. And where citizens, in turn, make the effort to verify before sharing, to pay for quality journalism, to maintain a space of intellectual humility in which they might be wrong about a story they've been following from a single source.

This transaction presupposes that both sides are capable of and willing to hold up their end. For media, it means radical reform of practices — not voluntary and timid, but structural and urgent. For citizens, it means relearning a cognitive patience that the speed of social media has largely destroyed. Neither transformation is easy. Both are necessary. And neither can happen without the other.

Rebuilding trust in media means also rebuilding trust in truth itself — in the idea that facts are not a matter of opinion, that expert consensus is worth more than a contrarian claim, that rigor is a value. That seems obvious. It isn't. In an environment where every claim is challenged, where every expert is suspected of a hidden agenda, where the very notion of objectivity has become a political battlefield, saying that truth exists and is worth pursuing is a position that requires defending. I defend it. Without hesitation. And without apology.

Disinformation as anti-matter of democratic deliberation

Democracy, at its deepest level, is a system of collective decision-making based on shared access to information. Citizens vote, debate, hold power accountable — but only if they have a sufficiently common understanding of reality to make deliberation possible. When that common understanding dissolves — when citizens live in completely separate informational universes, when the same events receive incompatible interpretations, when shared facts capable of grounding rational deliberation no longer exist — democracy doesn't just function badly. It loses the conditions of its own possibility.

Disinformation, in this sense, is not simply a problem of wrong facts. It is the anti-matter of democratic deliberation: it destroys the substance out of which collective decisions can be formed. An election in which a significant fraction of voters are acting on completely false information is not just a poorly informed election — it's an election whose democratic legitimacy is itself in question. This is the ultimate political stake of the media trust crisis. Not just bad journalism. Not just partisan polarization. The structural conditions of democratic self-governance itself.

Resisting together: the only project worth pursuing

The media trust crisis is global, but its solutions are necessarily both structural and cultural, both institutional and individual. There is no silver bullet — no single regulation, no single technology, no single educational reform that will resolve it. What's required is a civilizational response: a conscious, sustained, collective commitment to the defense of factual reality as the foundation of democratic life. That commitment must span governments, media organizations, educational institutions, civil society groups, technology companies, and individual citizens.

This is not utopian. It is the same kind of response that democracies have mobilized before against existential threats — a combination of institutional reform, cultural change and civic mobilization. The informational crisis is less visible than a military invasion, less spectacular than a financial collapse. But its consequences, measured over decades, may be equally devastating. Democracies that fail to defend their informational foundations may find one day that they have preserved the form of democratic institutions while losing their substance. That is the catastrophe worth preventing. While there is still time.

I say "we" throughout this article because I exclude no one — not journalists, not platforms, not regulators, not citizens. We are all nodes in the information network. We all have responsibilities proportional to our power. And we all have an interest in the outcome: a world where facts still exist, where truth is still worth pursuing, where journalism serves democracy rather than destroying it. This isn't a professional interest. It's a human one. The one I choose to fight for every day I sit down to write.

The advertising model and its perverse effects

The attention economy — the system by which digital platforms generate revenue by selling user attention to advertisers — has created perverse incentives that are structurally incompatible with quality information. Content that captures attention maximizes revenue. Content that captures attention is content that triggers strong emotions — outrage, fear, indignation, moral contempt. Content that triggers strong emotions is disproportionately content that is extreme, simplistic, divisive. And so the architecture of digital advertising has created an environment that systematically rewards disinformation and penalizes nuance.

This is not a conspiracy. It's the emergent product of an economic system that was designed without taking into account the social and democratic externalities of its optimization. Advertisers don't want to fund disinformation — many have actively sought to avoid it through brand safety initiatives. But as long as the underlying model rewards engagement above all else, and as long as disinformation reliably outperforms verified information for engagement, the system will continue to produce the outcomes we are observing. Fixing the advertising model isn't a media ethics question. It's a systems design question.

Toward regulation of recommendation algorithms

The regulation of recommendation algorithms is one of the most technically complex and politically sensitive frontiers of the media trust debate. Algorithms determine what billions of people see, read and hear every day — they are the most powerful editorial force in human history, entirely unaccountable to any democratic process. Regulating them without censoring content — imposing transparency obligations and diversity requirements without dictating which ideas can be promoted — is a genuine challenge. But it is solvable.

Several concrete approaches have been proposed and partially tested: algorithmic auditing rights for independent researchers, default chronological feeds as an alternative to engagement-optimized recommendation, diversity requirements that would require platforms to expose users to a broader range of perspectives rather than simply reinforcing existing preferences, interoperability mandates that would allow users to take their social graph to competing platforms. None of these is a complete solution. Taken together, they represent a meaningful reform agenda — one that the EU's DSA has partially begun to implement, and which deserves to be taken much further.

I don't believe social networks are intrinsically bad. I've seen them coordinate humanitarian aid in disaster zones. Amplify voices that would otherwise remain invisible. Create communities of support for people who had none. The problem isn't the technology. The problem is the governance of the technology — the design choices, the economic incentives, the accountability structures that shape how these platforms operate. Those are political choices. They can be made differently. The question is whether there is sufficient democratic will to make them.

A democratic emergency underestimated

What we are witnessing is not a normal evolution of the media landscape. It is not simply the painful but inevitable transition to a digital model. It is a democratic emergency — quiet, slow, without the dramatic markers that would trigger a collective mobilization equivalent to its scale. The collapse of media trust is a crisis that doesn't declare itself, that advances in the background noise of daily politics, that manifests in electoral surprises and policy failures that seem inexplicable but whose informational roots are increasingly visible on examination.

The urgency is real. The tools to respond to it exist or can be developed. The models that work — Finland, the Baltic states, the Trust Project, the DSA — offer concrete roadmaps. What is lacking, in most Western democracies, is the political will to treat the defense of the informational commons as the first-order democratic priority it actually is. Every year of delay is a year in which the trust deficit deepens, the disinformation infrastructure expands, and the conditions for democratic deliberation further erode. The cost of inaction compounds. And at some threshold, it may become irreversible.

Truth as an act of resistance

In a world where disinformation is weaponized, where facts are contested as political positions, where the very concept of shared reality is under attack — rigorous journalism is not simply a professional practice. It is a political act. Publishing a well-sourced article that contradicts a state narrative, correcting an error publicly and visibly, maintaining editorial standards under economic pressure — these are acts of resistance against a system that profits from uncertainty and confusion. They are not heroic in themselves. They are the minimum of what the profession demands. But in the current environment, meeting that minimum takes a courage and a conviction that must be collectively valued and defended.

The media trust crisis will not resolve itself. It requires active intervention — from governments, platforms, educators, and citizens. But at its foundation, it requires something more fundamental: a recommitment to the idea that truth matters, that facts are not a political position, that democracy cannot survive without a shared informational floor. That commitment starts with each article, each sentence, each sourced and verified fact. It's a small act. Repeated millions of times, it becomes a civilizational choice.

I end this commentary with this conviction I carry like armor: facts are not an opinion. Truth is not a perspective. Rigor is not a bias. These propositions seem trivial. In 2026, in a world where 37% of people trust their media, where disinformation spreads 6 times faster than verified information, where democratic leaders call journalists "enemies of the people" — these propositions are revolutionary. I claim them. I will keep claiming them. Because the day I stop believing them is the day I should stop writing.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a columnist and analyst. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

I do not claim the cold objectivity of traditional journalism, which stops at reporting facts. I claim analytical clarity, rigorous interpretation and a deep understanding of the complex issues that concern us all. My role is to give meaning to the facts, to place them in their historical and strategic context, and to offer a critical reading of events.

Method and sources

This text keeps the basic distinction between verified facts and interpretive analysis. The rule never changes: a factual claim is published only when a verifiable source supports it, and the sources this article actually used are listed under Sources, never here.

Primary source families used by the publication, when the story has them: official statements from governments and international institutions, public statements by political leaders, reports from intergovernmental organisations, dispatches from recognised international news agencies.

Secondary source families: specialised publications, internationally recognised news media, analyses from established research institutions, reports from industry organisations.

When an article cites statistical, economic or geopolitical data, it comes from the institutions that produce it (intergovernmental organisations, central banks, national statistics offices), and the exact institution is named under Sources.

Nature of the analysis

The analyses, interpretations and perspectives in the analytical sections of this article are a critical, contextual synthesis based on the information available, the trends observed and the expert comments cited in the sources consulted.

My role is to interpret these facts, to set them in the context of today's geopolitical and economic dynamics, and to give them a coherent meaning within the larger story of the changes shaping our time. These analyses reflect expertise built through continuous observation of international affairs and an understanding of the strategic mechanisms that drive global actors.

This article describes a documented state of affairs on its publication date, not a prediction: later developments may shift its outlook. No update is promised in advance; when an article is corrected or completed, the change is dated in the text.