Trust Dialogues
Trust Dialogues are TIM’s public virtual conversations that highlight leaders across sectors who bring insight into how trust, credibility, and information quality show up in their work. These sessions help raise awareness of the information trust crisis, elevate practical examples, and potentially even spark new ideas for collaboration.
To recommend a speaker or topic, please reach out to info@timcoop.org.
Making Sense of Today’s News in An AI-Driven World
Featuring Sally Lehrman
News plays a critical role in helping people understand the world, hold leaders accountable, and make informed decisions. But as unreliable and overwhelming information continues to proliferate online, many people are increasingly disengaging from news altogether, with serious consequences for public trust and democratic life.
In this Trust Dialogue, TIM welcomed Sally Lehrman, founder of the Trust Project and a Peabody Award-winning journalist, for a conversation on the forces undermining access to reliable news and what it will take to rebuild trust and value in a news landscape facing deep structural challenges.
The discussion explored why the Trust Project’s Trust Indicators® remain as important as ever, how greater transparency can help people identify credible information, and practical ways individuals and organizations can navigate the volume and uncertainty of today’s information environment.
The Future of Trust in an AI-Driven World
Featuring J.D. Maddox
Trust is essential to a well functioning democracy, but trust in American institutions is at an all-time low. An array of factors are at play: a political structure that rewards extreme views, a communication system that boosts outrage, external actors with plans for disruption, and more. Amid these factors, agentic AI is emerging as a new social disruptor, enabling bad actors to create authentic-looking communications intended to defraud and mislead soft targets. Join information operations expert J.D. Maddox for an inside look at the new AI systems that can defend against these new hybrid information attacks, and gain a better understanding of the broad array of systemic solutions to our generation's societal challenge.
Signals, Standards, and Decision-Making Under Uncertainty
Featuring Ambassador Demetrios Marantis
Our May Trust Dialogue featured Ambassador Demetrios Marantis, former U.S. Trade Representative and senior executive at Square, Visa, and JPMorgan, for a conversation on how leaders make high-stakes decisions when signals are ambiguous and standards are unclear.
From tariff volatility to AI governance to the broader question of what effective information infrastructure looks like across sectors, this discussion explored how organizations operate when the information environment itself is uncertain.
Trust Is the Product: Radical Moderation and Institutional Credibility
Featuring Lauren Hall
Media organizations that have lost public trust have often lost it by falling into the binary trap themselves, becoming legible as an ideological tribe rather than as information providers. Radical moderation offers a practical framework for rebuilding credibility, not through fake "both-sidesism" but through genuine epistemic humility and 4D analysis.
Trust in Media Cooperative welcomes Professor Lauren Hall for this virtual discussion.
Lessons on Building Trust in the Age of AI
Featuring Tiffany Saade
Tiffany Saade, AI security leader at Cisco and advisor to Lebanon's Minister of AI, joined Trust in Media Cooperative for our first Trust Dialogue of 2026. Tiffany brought a rare combination of technical, policy, and frontline governance experience, shaping AI frameworks in a country rebuilding public trust from the ground up.
In this session, Tiffany explored what it takes to build trust in information when institutions, technology, and the public are starting from a fragile baseline. She shared lessons from Lebanon's emerging AI ecosystem, including how governments, companies, and citizens understand and respond to AI generated content, how low trust environments make it harder for people to distinguish reliable information, and what these dynamics signal for the United States as public trust continues to decline.