Some disturbing statistics from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press — 36% of Americans believe the press hurts democracy, including 48% of Republicans and 57% of those Republicans who get their news from Fox.

The data suggest that opposition to the press spikes among members of the president’s party during high-profile controversies such as Iran-Contra, the impeachment of President Clinton, and the war in Iraq:

Here’s the same data plotted in time series form:

A plot of General Social Survey data on media trust from a new article by Paul Gronke and the late Timothy Cook in Political Communication (sub. req.) shows a similar pattern:

As the authors note in the article, the decline in trust in the press is correlated with a general decline in trust in political institutions, but media trust has gone down even more than we would have expected.