“As Independence Day approaches, more than one in four Americans are so alienated from their government that they believe it may “soon be necessary to take up arms” against it, according to a new poll released Thursday by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics (IOP). That startling finding, which comes in the midst of congressional hearings into the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, was just one of several reflections of the dangerous level of estrangement many Americans feel from each other and our democratic institutions. The survey of 1,000 registered voters, conducted last month by Republican pollster Neil Newhouse and Democratic pollster Joel Benenson with input from students at the IOP, was designed to probe polarization and its relationship to the news sources upon which Americans rely in a fractionated media environment. The portrait that it paints reveals not only the growing divides we have witnessed in recent years but strong sentiments that the majority of media outlets contribute to these divisions by intentionally misleading their audiences to promote a political point of view..

About three-quarters (73 percent) of voters who identify themselves as Republican agree that “Democrats are generally bullies who want to impose their political beliefs on those who disagree.” An almost identical percentage of Democrats (74 percent) express that view of Republicans. A similarly lopsided majority of each party holds that members of the other are “generally untruthful and are pushing disinformation…Fully half say they have friends or relatives “who have changed because of the media they consume.” And in today’s media environment, where Americans can choose from a plethora of sources for news and information, a majority of Americans (50 percent) believe that when they have political differences, it is less caused by “honest disagreement” than that those who disagree are “misinformed because of where they get their information.”…