The cause, however, might not be Putnam's indirect one of displacement of group activities in favor of time before the television screen, which leads to fewer trusting relationships in group activities, which in turn spills over into less trust in government. The intervening step need not be this claim of spillover but might instead be the claim that citizens, in part because of the visual power of television, now know too much to have confidence in many officials. Television does not tell us as much about politics as our former newspapers did, but it gives us information far more viscerally. Television helped to destroy the credibility of many local politicians in the South during the civil rights era (Garrow 1978), and it helped to destroy the credibility of the war in Vietnam.

XREF: Challenges or offers an alternative to Robert Putnam's 'Bowling Alone' thesis on declining civic trust via television.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 743