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Notes -
I feel this point on a spiritual level. I wish I could treat most interactions as if I live in a high-trust environment, but instead it feels like virtually every person I don't have a personal connection with is trying to suck me into a sales funnel which has some ponzi-like aspects at the other end of it.
The entire concept of trust is based around believing that it is costly for someone else to defect against you, or that the person simply has no major desire to defect and will maintain a stable status quo because it's easy.
And humans have multiple inbuilt skills and learned techniques for determining how much to trust someone. But I think most of these are assuming a linear increase in the 'reward' for defection, when in reality, due to asymetric information, the payoff for defection has increased exponentially outside of the individuals awareness.
i.e. with crypto rugpulls, most of the individual investors are probably not dumping their life saving's into a given shitcoin all at once. Oh some individuals certainly are, but most of them will probably put in a little at a time, see a positive return, add some more, then some more, all while hearing reassurance from the project devs that things are on track and the price increase is a sign of strength.
What isn't obvious to an individual investor is how many other rubes are being pulled in over time which means the reward available for pulling the rug is increasing faster than any individual investor's stake is increasing.
So while each individual investor feels like they're logically incrementing trust in the project in a linear fashion, the other side sees something like exponential growth in the pot, which eventually crosses a threshold and they disappear with the funds.
And this applies to many 'edge case' situations where the individual believes there's a 'mutual' relationship occurring (I give you X, I expect Y in return), but the other party's goal isn't so much to provide Y, it's to get lots and lots of people who want Y to come to them so they can increase the amount of X they receive enough that their relationship with any individual customer doesn't matter.
Incidentally, this is why I tend to vastly prefer working with local, small businesses when I am spending a significant amount of money on an important project where the incentive to cut corners would otherwise be quite high.
As you say, Media companies are at their most valuable when they have a high amount of built-up trust. But the same principal as above applies. Someone may 'invest' increasing trust in a media company in small increments. So they think "well I've read 40 stories from this company that were accurate and useful, perhaps I can rely on their reporting after all!" But if the actual number of people investing trust increases, from the media company's side they see it as having 3 million people who are likely to accept their story as true without much skepticism. Which presents a way more valuable opportunity than any individual reader is aware.
And so they may switch over to a mode that exploits that trust. Especially if they can offer this service to a third party. "We can publish a favorable PR story for you/your company and expect 3 million people to uncritically believe it!"
Maybe they only have to throw in a puff piece for every 1 in 50 stories, maybe it's 1 in 15, but the point is that they don't have to immediately start publishing constant lies in order to take advantage of a trust relationship built up over time.
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