A new study traces more than thirty years of changing public attitudes toward the news media, and unhappily finds that to know journalism is to disdain it. Timothy E. Cook and Paul Gronke, in the July edition of Political Communication, find that “for the heaviest consumers of the news (the more educated, the better-off, older respondents),…familiarity with the news product breeds a lack of confidence (if not contempt) with the press as an institution.”

It could be that people tend to conflate the often-unsavory content of the news with those who deliver it. Or it could be that being highly educated not only predisposes one to heavy media use, but also to a critical attitude. But then why would education not so consistently be associated with disdain of other leading institutions?

Part of the answer is demographic. The people who trust the media least tend to be not only heavy news consumers but particularly social conservatives, political Republicans, and the religiously devout—groups that have come to make up a larger portion of the U.S. population in recent decades, relative to their more press-friendly counterparts. “Confidence in the press has fallen in part,” the authors write, “because those groups that formerly constituted a core of support…(Democrats, liberals, partisans in opposition to the party in power) have shrunk considerably over the last three decades.” (Or at least they had as of 2004, the cut-off for the data that Cook and Gronke used.)

It wasn’t always thus. In the backslapping days after Watergate, levels of confidence in the press routinely surpassed those for Congress and the president, though falling short of the level of trust in the military or the Supreme Court. Yet while confidence in the legislative and executive branches bounced up and down in the intervening thirty years, confidence...

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