Democracies are commonly described as communities of fate, built on trust between citizens and the government. In the tradition of Tocqueville, the chapter introduces the classical distinction between social trust as the horizontal bonds of a civil community that facilitate self-government and political trust as the vertical linkage between citizens, their associations and the binding force of institutions and government. In the first case, trust involves voluntarily engaging with others in interpersonal relationships based on the belief that, at worst, others will do no harm and, at best, act in the common interest. In the second case, trust depends on well-functioning institutions and efficient government performance. The fact that political trust depends on public and institutionalised mediators of knowledge, information and opinion adds a further dimension to trust. This is because the infrastructures that mediate trust between citizens and governments must be reliable in the way they amplify and filter information of shared relevance. The chapter introduces this third dimension of trust in modern society as ‘trust in the media’ and argues that it should be distinguished conceptually from ‘social trust’ and ‘political trust’. Although the potential of the media to undermine social and political trust is widely recognised, there is a lack of understanding regarding how media institutions are trusted and the role of media infrastructures in building horizontal and vertical trust relationships.