One my favorite rites of midwinter is when Richard Edelman, chief executive of the Chicago-based global public relations firm that bears his name, returns to town to report on whom we trust and whom we distrust.
Lo and behold, we don’t trust government much. Not just here in Illinois — which gives us good cause for distrust seemingly sometimes by the day — but globally too.
Government is regarded both as the least ethical and the least competent among four major categories. The media is next in line as the least trusted. On the other end of the barometer, business and nongovernmental organizations enjoy substantial respect for ethics and competence.
Coming over the horizon is artificial intelligence, a disruptive technology of great potential that nevertheless is shaking the foundations of trust around the globe. Edelman told a packed room at the Executives’ Club of Chicago last week that AI could be at an inflection point.
If AI’s coders, business strategists and proponents aren’t careful, an underlying skepticism or even fear could set in that might be difficult to undo, Edelman warned.
“By 2 to 1, people don’t trust the pace of innovation,” Edelman said. “They’re nervous that it’s been poorly managed. They see the lack of transparency. They feel there is no consideration of impacts, and they don’t see that there’s enough government regulation.”
He drew comparisons between AI in its infancy and what happened to genetically modified organisms in the 1990s. GMOs never came close to achieving their potential: Skeptics branded them as “Frankenfoods,” and the category never recovered trust from consumers.
A surprising side note to the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer, an internet survey of more than 32,000 people around the globe, is that the Midwest is the least trusting region in the U.S. Edelman cites the devastating impact of globalization on job security as a key factor.
Drill down even further into our state, and there’s one particular aspect of life here that spikes a lack of trust: the unethical and outright illegal behavior of government officials.
A few days after Edelman spoke, Tim Mapes was sentenced to 2.5 years in federal prison for lying to federal investigators. Mapes was a longtime key aide to then-House Speaker Michael Madigan, and he lied to the G-men rather than tell the truth about his political boss.
Madigan awaits trial on public corruption charges, after four associates were found guilty in an influence-peddling scheme involving ComEd and other companies with business before the state.
Former Ald. Ed Burke, once the preening, powerful dean of Chicago’s City Council, now awaits sentencing for corruptly shaking down companies with business before the council in order to sign them up as clients of his real estate law practice.
Those are just the marquee names. There are dozens more: In Chicago alone, more than 30 alderman since 1972 have been convicted of crimes related to their official duties. The sprawling federal investigation targeting Madigan has also taken down other elected officials.
Not all the trust-breaking behavior in Illinois is illegal, by the way. Sometimes, as the saying goes, the real scandal involves what’s altogether unethical but still legal.
One such case is taking shape in one of the least-known offices in northern Illinois: the Cook County Board of Review. The obscure agency has remarkable power. It can reverse property valuations by the Cook County assessor. The board has reversed numerous assessment increases by Fritz Kaegi, the reform-minded technocrat first elected assessor to succeed Joe Berrios in 2018.
On the board, and running for reelection, sits Larry Rogers Jr. And Rogers is willing to accept campaign payments — to the tune of $135,000 in the last year — from people who have business before the board. The Tribune detailed Rogers’ conflicts of interest, as well as Rogers’ explanations for why he sees no problem doing business this way, in a story this week.
One Rogers donor was Matthew Tully, a lawyer who made contributions before and after he represented the Chicago Bears before the Board of Review. Tully argued that Kaegi overreached when he assessed the former Arlington Park racetrack property for $197 million — essentially what the Bears paid for it.
The Cook County inspector general recommended in 2015 a ban on soliciting or accepting campaign contributions from people with business before the Board of Review. For nearly a decade now, commissioners have ignored that advice and kept their palms open for gratuities, in the form of campaign contributions that might flow their way.
In 2018, when the county’s Ethics Board found commissioners had failed to comply with legal restrictions on the size of campaign contributions from people appearing before the board, Rogers returned $48,750, the Tribune’s A.D. Quig reported. Not to worry about Rogers, though: The Tribune found that many of the donors gave the returned fund to a political action committee of which Rogers is a member.
Midwesterners have plenty of reason to distrust government. Here in Illinois, with former public officials facing jail time and lax ethics rules allowing Rogers and others to flaunt their indiscretions, we come by our distrust the hard way — from bitter experience that seems to come at us, sometimes almost without end.
David Greising is president and CEO of the Better Government Association.