For the last session on this opening day of the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore I’m at a session on populism and propaganda, and we start with Karl Mendoza. He highlights the importance of trust, and the way that trust can fracture at times of scandal. When trust breaks down in a democracy, what exactly is if that people stop believing in – democracy itself, the system, its actors?
Scandals are often seen as breaches of ethics or governance, but they also activate competing moral grammars: in deeply divided democracies, trust does not simply divide – it polarises. Trust is therefore not simply fading – it serves to fragment us.
We can understand this through the idea of trust cultures: relational, emotionally charged frameworks for interpreting legitimacy. Scandals challenge these trust cultures, and bring different trust cultures into competition with each other; scandals are not just revealed, but constructed, and in the process of that construction we see blame, judgment, and repair performed. As this happens, trust is reallocated and realigned.
In the Philippines, the Dengvaxia scandal (around a potentially defective Dengue vaccine) brought three trust cultures into conflict: parental – as children were affected by it; journalistic – as journalism reported on the scandal; and institutional – since institutions were ultimately responsible.
Populists aligned themselves with the emotional grammars of the scandal, turning the scandal into a moral conflict; trust thus becomes a relational-symbolic challenge, and not just a media event. To understand scandals, we must ask who felt betrayed, and why.
