President Trump has broken the press in America.

Or at least he has left it bruised and battered, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center, which crunched reams of data collected from 50 surveys and found that while Democrats continue to have faith in American media, Mr. Trump’s followers are quite done with it all.

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The findings were released just days after the press received its latest black eye in the inspector general’s report looking at the FBI’s behavior during its investigation into Mr. Trump. The inspector general thoroughly punctured journalists who insisted that the Christopher Steele dossier had little to do with the FBI’s ability to obtain a secret warrant to spy on one of the candidate’s advisers.

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Fueled by those sorts of media missteps, Mr. Trump’s followers are in full revolt against the press.

According to Pew, the stronger the support for the president, the harsher the attitude toward the Fourth Estate.

And the more knowledge about politics, the deeper the divide. A staggering 91% of politically woke Democrats say journalists are acting in the best interests of the public. Only 16% of politically astute Republicans say the same thing, Pew found.

“Republicans who strongly approve of the job Trump is doing are far more pessimistic in their evaluations of the news media than other Republicans. And Democrats who are most disapproving of Trump’s job performance are often more supportive of the news media than Democrats who disapprove less strongly,” the researchers concluded.

The one area of agreement: Neither side thinks the press deals fairly with all perspectives of the news.

“The last four years show that the press is fundamentally broken,” said Curtis Houck, managing editor at NewsBusters.

His organization tracked cable news airtime last week and found that CNN aired 99% of House Democrats’ impeachment hearing but only a third of Senate Republicans’ hearing on the inspector general’s report that found the FBI abused the secret warrant process to target Mr. Trump.

Mr. Houck said CNN did spend additional time on the Republican hearing, but that was with its own reporters and pundits, who focused on the inspector general’s finding that the FBI followed its rules in starting the Trump investigation while dismissing the finding that the bureau broke its rules to obtain the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant.

Mr. Houck said that kind of selective coverage sticks with Americans already jaded by the press hype of the Steele dossier, the largely discredited anti-Trump research conducted at the behest of the Clinton campaign that the inspector general now says was the critical tipping point in obtaining the FISA warrant.

“The Steele dossier is wrong, then you have the coverage of the report coming out, and CNN and the like aren’t covering it to the degree they should. The result is people don’t trust the press and they don’t think their ethics are on the up-and-up,” Mr. Houck said.

That is particularly true for Republican viewers, according to Pew, which found that just 20% think journalists have high ethical standards and only 30% believe the press acts in the best interests of the public. Self-identified Democrats, meanwhile, were far more forgiving, with 76% saying the press acts for the public and 64% believing in high ethical standards.

Even Democrats, though, are skeptical of fairness in the press. Just 37% said news organizations deal fairly with all sides. Among Republicans, only 12% thought so.

The more Republicans support Mr. Trump, the less likely they are to see journalists as fair or credible.

(Excerpt from The Washington Times. Article by Stephen Dinan.)