ABSTRACT In this response to Tolbert's 2025 commentary, “Trust, Distrust, and the ‘Competent Outsider’: Rethinking Science Education's Responsibilities in the (Dis)Information Crisis,” we address the nature of disinformation in the untamed landscape of public media, what we call “science‐in‐the‐wild.” We contrast political perspectives about how to situate science in society with the epistemic need to share specialized knowledge in society and the corresponding educational role of science media literacy in discerning who speaks for the expert scientific consensus. Notably, we distinguish interpersonal trust (based on individual judgments about power and benevolence) with epistemic trust (based on principles of conveying reliable knowledge).
Allchin et al. (Sat,) studied this question.