In what should really come as no surprise to anybody at this point, there is new data out showing that virtually no one really seems to trust the media anymore.

According to a recent Gallup poll, trust in American institutions is down almost across the board.

Americans are less confident in major U.S. institutions than they were a year ago, with significant declines for 11 of the 16 institutions tested and no improvements for any. The largest declines in confidence are 11 percentage points for the Supreme Court — as reported in late June before the court issued controversial rulings on gun laws and abortion — and 15 points for the presidency, matching the 15-point drop in President Joe Biden’s job approval rating since the last confidence survey in June 2021.

But the media is the second least-trusted institution in America. The only institution with less trust from the American people is (understandably) Congress.

This, via Axios, is probably even more telling than they intended it to be.

By the numbers: The trust fall in the news media been driven mostly by Republicans, according to the data.

• Just 5% of Republicans said they had “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence” in newspapers, compared to 35% of Democrats.
• Only 8% of Republicans said they had “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence” in TV news, compared to 20% of Democrats.
• Independents’ views are generally closer to Republicans’.

The big picture: The media trust gap between Democrats and Republicans began to widen during the the Bush and Obama administrations, but grew dramatically during the Trump era and has continued to widen.

I wonder why Republican voters in particular would have less trust in the media than Democrats? Whatever could the reason be?

Could it be that the media routinely covers for Democrats? They actively sought to quash the Hunter Biden story in 2020, had multiple anti-Trump stories retracted over the course of his presidency, and have continued to attack anyone who has dared to vote for Trump as a far-right extremist.

It could be the fact that supposedly objective outlets like CNN had focused so much on preaching rather than reporting that Americans were turned off by the likes of Chris Cuomo, Don Lemon, and others.

CNN staffers are currently extremely unhappy with their current ratings, and are blaming everyone but themselves, according to my RedState colleague Levon Satamian. The continued sink in ratings is carryover from the Zucker era. The restructuring is still underway, and it’s going to be a while before they recover. But CNN staffers unhappy with the changes are the exact type of people who were pushing viewers away in the first place.

The most notable tidbit from the Gallup poll, though, is this: The biggest drop in trust in the media is from independents. Those voters fell from 19 percent trust in newspapers in 2021 to 12 percent. In television news, trust dropped from 13 percent to 8 percent (interestingly, Republican trust in television news grew by 2 percent).

Analysis of most major outlets almost uniformly shows a left-leaning bias. If independents are fleeing from the media in droves, as it appears they are, then that’s actually another bad electoral sign for the Democrats come November. Bad enough their politicians are chasing away independents and Hispanic voters, but now even the media can’t effectively run interference anymore.