Edelman Trust Barometer Results: It's CSR Time

The big conclusion everyone’s drawn from the 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer is that the public’s confidence in both media and government has hit a low point. The most important metric is supposedly a jump in the gap between trust in business and trust in government, and the only three notable countries in which the latter trumps the former are South Korea, Sweden and the United Arab Emirates.

Hold on, though: this doesn’t mean that we’re about to enter some neo-Libtertarian utopia.

The findings can be summed up with three big letters: CSR.

While the public trusts government less than ever before, the same is true of business: a majority of well-educated participants call for more regulation of industry, not less (by a three-to-one margin). As