Time for ye olde “trust in media varies by party” poll thumbsucker. Pew did a more thorough job with the same question two months ago, in particular by tracking eroding GOP support over time to show how powerful the rise of conservative talk radio has been on Republicans’ perceptions of the MSM. The new data from Gallup is more cursory and doesn’t address long-term trends except for noting the 20-point decline in overall confidence in the media between 1976 and 1997; compare that with the Pew data and you’ll see that most of that decline likely came at the tail end of that period. But here’s the oddly reassuring result I promised you:

It’s an article of absolute faith among the nutroots that the media skews conservative, even occasionally to the point of acting like, ahem, “lapdogs” for the Bush administration. (See Mortman for a recent example of “lapdog” behavior.) Many in the media are only too happy to accept that criticism, of course, since it gives them a license to tack even further left in the interest of “restoring balance.” According to Gallup, though, the nutroots position is decidedly the minority position among Democrats, with only six percent more finding the media too conservative than too liberal. Hard to draw any broad conclusions about the Kosification or lack thereof of the party generally from that, but the result isn’t exactly discouraging.

Update: Reader Scott M. wonders whether we can safely extrapolate from the Gallup results and last week’s headline-grabbing Fox News poll that the nutroots comprises roughly 20% of the Democratic Party. Hmmm.