That's the same refrain I hear from tons of people, from Donald Trump and Biden to TurboTax to the HR department.
What I don't understand about journalists is why they think any of us believe they especially deserve anyone's trust.
It may be true that you hear similar refrains from different quarters, but, the best diagnosis I have heard of this is that it's a similarity in psychology without a similarly in underlying facts.
So broad brush despair against "the system" as a whole is, to me, not doing the homework of trying to differentiate. Sometimes those claims will be true, sometimes they won't, and the devil will be in the details. And we shouldn't regard any discussion to have truly begun until participants show an interest in doing the homework.
I would say the balance of emphasis at the Intercept has been pretty clearly on truth-to-power stories, and they clearly haven't prioritized customer lock-in or profitability to a similar degree. I might be right or wrong here, but meaningful conversations will, as ever, have to center on specific facts pertinent to their history rather than broad brush declarations of despair at the impossibility of knowing.
Excellent question.
I guess the answer is simply mutatis mutandis: they appreciate that they don't have, but do need our trust and that uttering said refrain might achieve installing it :-)