But a person can read millions of lines of source code. It's perfectly possible given enough time and with a solid team you can do it in 90 days.
Trust is not the problem. Nobody actually needs trust any more. It's a 19th century concept. Modern markets select away inefficient and unpredictable collaboration protocols like trust and replaces them with violence, transparency, and pervasive surveillance.
The problem is the lack of verifiability. The vast majority of what comes out of the American media is unverifiable nonsense. Take out all the anonymous sources, leaked but undisclosed emails, "he said, she said", baseless speculation and the ever popular "reporting of reporting" (where media entity A reports on X simply because media entity B reports X -- even though X is pure bullshit) and what you'd be left with is the market data and live events.
TFA is probably right that most Americans are hopelessly biased. But this may be the natural result of a media diet that is so completely lacking in basic verifiable information. Any conman knows if you ask people to believe X without evidence they will only believe it if they want to believe it (and they will believe it much more strongly than they would if you had presented evidence). Do this enough times and you can train people to believe anything, again without a shred of evidence. The end result is a nation of media consumers trained from a very young age to accept information without evidence so long as that information confirms their own ideology.