The longstanding project called the General Social Survey, which has polled Americans about their feelings on a variety of political and social issues for more than 35 years, just recently came out with their preliminary 2008 data (which, I should warn you, is a little bit cumbersome to access).
One of my favorite sets of questions on the GSS is one that asks Americans about their degree of confidence in various social institutions; here is what those numbers looked like in 2008 as compared with eight years earlier before George W. Bush won the Presidency, as well as in 1976 when this question was first posed:
[From FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: Americans Losing Their Faith in Faith … And Everything Else]
So in wake of Watergate and Vietnam, the press was at 29% but the end of the Clinton witchhunts and today, after wars of choice and looting the treasury/crony capitalism, it’s less than a third of that.
Looks like a self-inflicted wound . . .