Though President Donald Trump is often accused of waging a war against the free press and causing Americans to lose faith in the biased media, in truth he is merely expressing a sentiment long held by a significant portion of the country.

In fact, Trump's oft-repeated "fake news" and "enemy of the people" pronouncements are little more than echoes of a decades-old deep and growing distrust toward the mainstream media by just about everybody who isn't a liberal partisan.

That sentiment was on display when a woman repeatedly expressed her lack of trust in the media as she disrupted a live shot by an MSNBC reporter in the halls of the Capitol building while he attempted to deliver a report on the ongoing impeachment effort.

Correspondent Garrett Haake was only a few seconds into his report for MSNBC host Nicole Wallace when he began to back up and motioned for his cameraman to follow him.

Seconds later the woman, recording with her cell phone and speaking inaudibly, circled around behind Haake, which caused him and the cameraman to begin to spin around and face the opposite direction.

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The woman, who at one point was heard accusing the network of being "nothing but a bunch of liars," and later repeatedly said, "shame," would not be deterred from her efforts, however, which compelled Haake and his cameraman to engage in an odd sort of waltz in the hallway, spinning and stopping and moving again for more than a minute, all while he continued to deliver his report without a pause.

Eventually, the dance to obtain a clear and uninterrupted background for the live shot came to an end as the woman either gave up or was somehow prevented from continuing her attempt to impede Haake's report.

It was then that Wallace uttered an absolutely absurd statement.

"You guys are the real heroes, doing your jobs outside the comforts of climate-controlled studios and handling with grace people who have strong feelings about the press, so kudos to you, my friend," Wallace said.

While Trump may have latched on to and even amplified the general lack of trust among Americans in the mainstream media, that distrust already existed long before he stepped on the political scene and began to loudly and explicitly call out the liberal media for its increasingly overt bias.

Gallup reported in September that about 41 percent of Americans had a "great deal" or "fair amount" of trust in the media. That number justifiably plummeted to 32 percent in 2016 during the heated election season but had climbed back up to 45 percent in 2018, only to resume a downward trend again this year.

A chart stretching back to 1997 pegged trust in the media at the low- to mid-50 percentile and Gallup noted that trust had been as high as the upper-60s and low-70 percentiles when it first began tracking that question in the 1970s. In other words, the downward trend of distrust in the media is nothing new.

Nor does it appear that this is a sentiment that can be easily dismissed, at least not with how the media generally conducts itself in the current day, according to a study released early in 2019 by the Columbia Journalism Review, in conjunction with Reuters/Ipsos, to determine what was dubbed the "trust gap."

"For decades, we’ve known that Americans don’t trust the press," CJR wrote. "What we haven’t known is how people view the makings of journalism, from the use of fact-checkers and anonymous sources to the question of whether money skews journalistic decision-making."

One particularly shocking finding was that the media, even more so than Congress, rated the worst in terms of poll respondents saying they had "hardly any confidence at all" in a number of various national institutions.

Furthermore, aside from Democrats, that lack of trust stretched across educational, financial, generational, ideological, and most racial and religious lines.

The point being, the woman who attempted to disrupt the MSNBC reporter to express her distrust in the media certainly isn't alone, nor is she the first or the last person to feel that way. Until the bulk of the media comes to accept that and, with great introspection and sincerity, makes some fundamental changes to how it conducts itself going forward, that isn't about to change anytime soon.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.