When trust shrinks to the people we know, the messenger becomes the medium

A trusted messenger strategy starts from one fact about 2026: people no longer believe institutions by default, but they still believe the people they know. With trust in mass media at a record low and societies turning inward, the job of a campaign film is to equip those trusted messengers, not to broadcast louder. The messenger has become the medium.

For most of the last century, persuasion ran in one direction. An institution made a message, paid to place it, and a mass audience received it. That model assumed a baseline of trust in the channel itself. The surveys published over the past year say that baseline is gone, and they show where the trust went.

Why is trust in media so low?

Trust in media is low because audiences have steadily withdrawn confidence from large institutions and given it to people and sources that feel close to them. The decline is long and broad, and on current evidence it is still going.

In the United States, Gallup reported in October 2025 that only 28 percent of Americans trust newspapers, television and radio to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. It was the first time Gallup's measure had fallen below 30 percent, down from 31 percent in 2024 and 40 percent in 2020. Among Republicans the figure was 8 percent; among Democrats, 51 percent.

The pattern is not only American. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026, drawing on more than 97,000 respondents in 48 markets, found trust in news at 37 percent, the lowest since the Institute began measuring it in 2015. In the US the figure was 25 percent. The same report found that 27 percent of people get news from news-focused creators, rising to 46 percent when creators of any kind are included. Attention has followed trust out of the newsroom and toward individual voices.

What did the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer find?

The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found that trust has contracted toward the people closest to us, a shift Edelman calls society sliding into "insularity". The survey of nearly 34,000 respondents in 28 countries, released in January 2026, found that seven in 10 people are unwilling or hesitant to trust someone with different values.

What remains trusted is local and personal. Edelman found that 78 percent of employees trust their employer, and 64 percent of people trust their neighbors and their fellow citizens. Major news organizations, by contrast, showed a net trust score of minus 11. Read together with Gallup and Reuters, the picture is consistent: the circle of trust has shrunk to the people we can see.

When trust shrinks to the people we know, the most valuable thing a film can do is give those people something worth passing on.

Do political ads persuade voters?

Mostly, not very much. The best recent evidence suggests that a single exposure to a campaign ad barely moves opinion, while contact from someone you know can change behavior a great deal.

In a study published in Science Advances in 2020, Alexander Coppock, Seth Hill and Lynn Vavreck ran 59 randomized experiments testing 49 ads from the 2016 presidential race on about 34,000 people. The average effect on how favorably people viewed a candidate was about 0.05 points on a five-point scale, and the effect on vote choice was not statistically significant. As Coppock told Yale News, "Positive ads work no better than attack ads."

Compare that with a message from a friend. Columbia researchers Aaron Schein, Donald Green and David Blei studied the Outvote app in the 2018 midterms and found an 8 percentage point effect on the turnout of friends who received texts from people they knew, an effect the authors describe as among the largest reported in the get-out-the-vote literature. Research on deep canvassing points the same way. Across three field experiments reported in the American Political Science Review in 2020, Joshua Kalla and David Broockman found that conversations including a non-judgmental exchange of personal stories produced lasting reductions in exclusionary attitudes, where arguments alone did not. The common thread is the relationship, and the story told inside it, rather than the production budget.

What is relational organizing, and what does it mean for film?

Relational organizing is the practice of asking supporters to reach the people already in their lives (friends, family, neighbors, group chats) rather than contacting strangers on an institution's behalf. For filmmakers, it changes the brief. The viewer is no longer the end of the line. The viewer is the distributor.

That is how we have been designing campaign work. For Brazil's presidential runoff on October 25, 2026, #Virada13 was an independent film, not an official campaign production, built on the great comebacks of Brazilian sport. By our records it premiered on October 23 on the Instagram accounts of Mark Ruffalo and Jason Momoa. Alongside it we launched virada.vote, a bilingual site where anyone could download the film with a ready-made caption, post it to their own channels and send it by WhatsApp to five people they love. Lula won the runoff with 51.78 percent of the vote, according to the electoral court's count as reported by MercoPress. Many people and many efforts produced that result; the film was one voice among them.

The same model is running in the United States now. #VoteEarly, a one-minute film for the No Kings Vote Early push ahead of Election Day on November 3, 2026, lives on voteearly.vote. Partners and supporters can download it in 16:9 for feeds or 9:16 for Stories, Reels and TikTok, paste a caption, and send it to five people with a link to plan their own early vote. As we write, the results are not in.

The idea predates both. In 2020, #VoteUnited, our film made in support of the Biden-Harris ticket, was built from unscripted Millennial voices and designed from the start to pass from peer to peer rather than from institution to audience. By our account it circulated through group chats, text banks and small-group Zoom calls, the kind of personal channel the research points to.

For any organization planning a campaign now, the practical shift is to budget for the handoff as seriously as the film: formats for every platform, captions in the audience's language, and a plain, specific ask to share with named people. The film still has to be good enough to be worth a friend's reputation. That bar is higher than any media buy.

Questions people ask

What is a trusted messenger strategy?

A trusted messenger strategy routes a message through people an audience already believes, such as friends, family, local leaders, employers or creators, instead of relying on institutional channels alone. It responds to the falling trust in media and institutions documented by Gallup, the Reuters Institute and Edelman. In practice it means making content that is easy for those messengers to pass on.

Do celebrity posts count as trusted messengers?

They can start a film's journey, as Mark Ruffalo's and Jason Momoa's posts did for #Virada13, but reach is not the same as trust. The research on friend-to-friend texting suggests the larger effect comes when ordinary supporters pass a message to people they know. The strongest campaigns use the first to set off the second.

How should campaigns distribute video in 2026?

Design for sharing from the start: provide downloadable files in horizontal and vertical formats, ready-made captions and a clear ask to send the film to specific people. The Reuters Institute's 2026 report found that 46 percent of people get news from creators of some kind, which rewards content that individuals can post as their own. Paid placement can then amplify what is already traveling.

If your organization is planning a campaign built around trusted messengers, apply to work with HUMAN__agency™.