I would appreciate less emphasis on pretending to cover news from several angles. By doing so they imply that both sides are equally valid even when they're not. For instance I've seen them bring on a climate change denier to give the "other side" on a climate change story; anti vaxxers, et cetera. It's particularly bad when one side is willing to lie.

Yes, some "sides" of some issues are objectively false. But the problem is that even where facts are not in dispute, the mainstream press's strong left-bias influences the facts it chooses to emphasize and the narratives it promotes.

Take the coverage of the Covington High School protest, for example. When the available facts seemed to support the narrative that white, male, MAGA-hat-wearing, anti-abortion Catholic students were racially harassing a defenseless Native American elder, the media was shouting "fascism!" from the rooftops.

But when more facts emerged in the form of a longer video showing the high school students being abused, and with no mere smirk, by a group of overtly racist Black Hebrew Israelites no less--and the Native American elder accosting the students rather than the other way around--suddenly that no longer serves a narrative the left wants to tell, and there's been comparatively little coverage of the aftermath of the mob unleashed by the initial reporting, of the death threats to students and the high school's temporary closure.

This is why it is crucial for the media to present the facts from more than one, very specific angle, even when the facts are largely not in dispute.

"suddenly that no longer serves a narrative the left wants to tell"

Except that that was also reported mostly everywhere. Also, one sided 'evil-looking' harassment is news that is more interesting to most people because it might signal some trend. No-one (left or right) would have found a word-fight between evenly-wrong grey characters very interesting if that was the story in the first place. Because it just isn't.

That doesn't make the mainstream press left-biased. I think it actually isn't.

> No-one (left or right) would have found a word-fight between evenly-wrong grey characters very interesting if that was the story in the first place.

That you would rank the Covington kids as "evenly-wrong" with their racist (not to mention adult) abusers is incredible.

Does the behaviour of one group somehow excuse the unacceptable behaviour of another? "Two wrongs don't make a right"?

(Not debating the "even-ness of wrongs", as that is a six-year-old's excuse for punching their sibling - "They started it!!")

Except there was no unacceptable behavior from the part of the kids (unless you consider "standing and smiling while being abused by racists and nutcases" unacceptable behavior). That was a complete fabrication to make the story fit the narrative. There weren't two wrongs - there was just one wrong, and it was from the other side than the press claimed it to be.

that arguably is another form of political bias - if I want to push position A, I will choose the most ridiculous and deranged proponent of position B to imply that "all rational people choose position A". Like on the issue of climate change - there's clearly some fraction of people who choose to deny it completely, but the more meaningful debate at this point is around how much we can do to prevent it, and what approaches might work (iron seeding, carbon sequestration, artificial photosynthesis, planting/algae cultivation, etc). Presenting a climate scientist who advocates a move to solar panels against a conspiracy theorist who thinks climate change is an invention of the new world order to seize control of the manufacturing industry is not a balanced presentation of the available angles.

There are credible scientists who disagree with the climate change narrative. Just because you don't agree with them doesn't make them "nut jobs" or "deniers" or any other label you care to attach. Equating folks who don't agree with a lot of climate change assertions with flat earthers is not productive in any way.

And I agree with you're analysis; legacy media typically trot out straw men only to signal how superior their view is.

I wasn't specifically saying all climate change deniers are nut jobs, just that the ones the media trots out often are. I'm not familiar enough with the denial side to evaluate their position - but that's the modern problem isn't it? We have to delegate to a third party to assess ideas for us because we don't have the time or expertise to fully understand every political position. But if that third party becomes biased, it all collapses.

> I'm not familiar enough with the denial side to evaluate their position

This is sort of third or fourth-hand, so don't just trust it blindly, but what I generally hear is that most of the real "other side" does actually believe climate change is real. They just oppose action because they believe humans aren't the cause, and almost any action we take will be a lot of wasted time and money that could be used better for other things.

The problem is that upon hearing that they oppose action, the "climate change is real" people totally ignore their reasons and lump them in with the crazy "climate change isn't real" people.

One: Roy Spencer.

The one time I heard him talk, he set off all of my kook alarms in the first few minutes of his lecture.

Why don't you go investigate the denial side? It will probably only take thirty minutes and might be interesting.

I did this once. I had fully accepted the media's narrative that these people were all kooks and idiots, so I was curious what could possibly cause them to think these things. I went and read some of their websites for the same reason I went and read some flat earther websites the other day, for amusement.

Unfortunately it turned out that (surprise) journalists had been wildly misleading me about what these people really believe, probably because journalists as a class of people accept intellectual authority without question, especially in the scientific realm. The problem of fraudulent psychology results is one well known example of this.

Here's what a lot of "climate change denial" really boils down to:

- CO2 is indeed a greenhouse gas. We are indeed releasing lots of it.

I've yet to see anyone deny this, although I'm sure there are people out there who do. However this is not mainstream "denial".

- But we don't really know what effect this is having, or if it's really changing the climate

This is where climate change "deniers" separate from journalistic mainstream. They aren't so much in denial as much, much less certain about climate science and its conclusions, to the extent that they often conclude nothing should be done.

- This is partly because the climate is too complex to model, and partly because of scientific bias, fraud and malpractice.

A lot of climate change denial turns out to be a specific case of more general criticisms of the scientific establishment. Their style of argument can easily be ported to criticisms of social science or economics, with hardly any tweaks.

Basically: proclaiming certain doom and that your field of study is the only way to avoid it is a surefire way to get massive amounts of grant money, media coverage and political power. In addition, the "deniers" tend to have lots of evidence of actual serious problems with the science. One recent article I saw pointed out that the thermometer dataset that has been used for over 20 years to measure climate change is full of obvious errors, like temperatures that would be physically impossible or which are clearly the result of bad celsius/Farenheit conversions, or which are taken from thermometers that are literally at the start of airport runways i.e. routinely blasted with jet exhaust.

When errors that are obvious to laymen are discovered in critical datasets that have been used for years to make very precise predictions about very complex things, it is reasonable for some people to conclude the science is less certain than journalists present it, and as a consequence that maybe the costs of inaction are lower than has been presented.

Thank you for this comment

It almost doesn't matter what a few credible scientists think about climate change--it maters what the overall consensus agree is and what most climate scientists believe. A huge part of science as a field is consensus.

How do you define or measure consensus?

I think this debate goes round in circles because we rely on news organisations to do several things at once, and they should probably be unbundled.

We rely on them to report immediate, factual events, like a fire in a hotel or an impending storm.

We rely on them to do longer form reporting on social trends, new scientific findings, business and governmental activities, etc.

We rely on them to locate and expose corruption and malpractice amongst the powerful.

We rely on them for book and film reviews.

And sometimes we rely on them to engage in analysis and generally telling us what to think, because figuring out our own opinions on complex topics is hard work. We'd like them to do it for us and then boil things down to an executive summary that we can then adopt wholesale as if it were our own opinions.

It's not clear to me that it makes sense to bundle so many things together, or if this is a useful combination or just an artifact of an earlier era when distributing the written word required lots of equipment and big agent networks. Now the internet exists should we be defending these agglomerations or breaking them apart?

>A huge part of science as a field is consensus.

How many were against Einstein for decades? Appeal to consensus among experts is still a fallacy.

Einstein finalized his theory of relativity in 1916 and it was widely accepted in the physics community by the 20s. Additionally, Einstein was primarily a theorist (vs an empiricist) so while there was room for initial disagreement, the solar eclipse in 1919 offered evidence and majority opinion accepted the theory.

Climate change has both consensus and evidence. It seems irresponsible to keep spreading doubt in the face of both.

He published his first important papers in 1905 and received the Nobel in 1921. His work was controversial for decades, but I would argue that there was no consensus in physics at that time.

I have encountered this before and am curious about the alternative take. My understanding of it is that they agree with the popular narrative to the extent that the climate is changing but that they disagree about how conclusive the evidence is that it is caused by humanity, is that correct?

Can anyone point me to hard, unbiased (in your opinion, of course) data that supports the assertion that climate change is caused by humans or otherwise depicts an accurate representation of our current understanding on the subject?

Is it possible that climate change is due to natural and not human forces?

That’s very reasonable. I doubt humans caused the last ice age. Maybe Mother Earth is up to some stuff herself. I rarely hear that discussed and instead hear news people pushing for aggressive measures.

I have yet to meet a climatologist who says this. Usually it is the other way around, they are exasperated that people don't take climate change as seriously as they should.

They need to stop being exasperated, because that implies that they keep hoping people will come around and that disaster can be averted. It can't. We might as well just prepare for complete ecological disaster, or resign ourselves to our fate which is going to be complete civilization collapse due to a climate that we simply can't live in at our current population levels.

Basically, instead of trying to convince people who still refuse to believe the evidence, they should be switching to something more productive, like building dome cities or building colonies on the Moon or something.

Your opinion on the predicted effects of climate change, are so far off from reality, that you are actually more incorrect than the climate change deniers.

No scientist believes that civilization is going to collapse because of climate change.

The predicted effects, according to the scientific consensus, is that sea levels will rise by a meter or 2 over the next hundred years. That is not an extinction level event. Not even close.

The scale of how bad things are, are more on the scale of trillions of dollars worth of damages. Thats bad, but it is bad on the same scale as another Iraq war, and not bad on the scale of billions dieing.

It's sometimes just incredible ignorance. You're right a more productive debate is called for though.

Case in point. The BBC trotting out Nigel Lawson as their standard puppet to "balance" pieces on climate change appears to have been about presenting the opposite point of view for balance. From a denier happy to spout easily disprovable fake facts, with no knowledge of the science. Every interview with a climate scientist appeared to come with a space for an unqualified denier. I suspect it's far more an indictment of a sad lack of scientific awareness in the BBC than deliberate political bias. Perhaps inevitable now they've been required to outsource so much.

Far from demonstrating the absurdity of the denier's position, for many of the public, it gave it credibility. For those with enough scientific awareness, yes his "balance" clearly consisted of cringe-inducing lies.

Of course it was made far worse by the BBC taking so long to realise and acknowledge their big mistake. I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the memo they had to send around late last year. I suppose cry, I expected much better of them. Maybe a little fact checking too.

> Presenting a climate scientist who advocates a move to solar panels against a conspiracy theorist who thinks climate change is an invention of the new world order to seize control of the manufacturing industry is not a balanced presentation of the available angles.

Remove the deliberately goofy language you've used ("conspiracy theorist," "new world order") and just say "someone who believes the danger of climate change is not real and is a lie perpetrated by the political left." When you've done that, you have a rather mainstream conservative American position.

What you see as deliberately manufactured, idiotic strawmen are sometimes just idiots.

> Presenting a climate scientist who advocates a move to solar panels against a conspiracy theorist who thinks climate change is an invention of the new world order to seize control of the manufacturing industry is not a balanced presentation of the available angles.

But this is litterally the position of both camps in the US right now. Donald Trump, Wells Griffith, Jeff Sessions, all have (or had) tremendous power over US energy policies, and they all share (publicly at least) indubitably non-scientific views on the climate change problem.

I'm aware of that. But then that's a slightly different topic - why do some people believe in climate change where others do not? I mean, I believe in anthropomorphic climate change but that's not because I have read the scientific papers and understood the nuance and the data - it's because I trust that the media is at least reporting in the right ball park, even if the nuance is lacking and the accuracy is minimal. And also that it makes logical sense that we can't just pump chemicals into the atmosphere and the sea at our world-spanning civilisational scale and expect nothing bad to happen.

But I think the whole issue comes down to a lack of trust in the media - if I already thought that the media is following a political agenda (or just exaggerating to get more views/shares) and then they started pushing climate change heavily, saying we need to aggressively regulate industries and eliminate blue-collar energy jobs in favour of high-tech clean energy (both generally considered left wing policies/strategies already) I would likely look at that with extreme skepticism.

So we're back to the issue of media trustworthiness. I think media needs to earn back the trust of the right in order that climate change reporting be taken seriously. There's still going to be the issue of industry advocates pushing fake science, but that needs a whole different approach to tackle.

> saying we need to aggressively regulate industries and eliminate blue-collar energy jobs in favour of high-tech clean energy (both generally considered left wing policies/strategies already)

There’s 180K people employed in oil, coal, and natural gas jobs compared to 370K in solar. From a pure numbers standpoint this is just a completely farscical angle, but it’s a great example of why there is no true media bias problem, but there is a huge problem with stupid people who will believe anything and vote with fear.

but you've just proved the point - the industry has shifted in favour of high tech over blue collar. I'm willing to bet that the disparity wasn't the same in the Bush era.

I don't personally think it's a conspiracy - as I said, I believe that we need to attempt to counteract anthropomorphic climate change. But the evidence does bear the idea out.

The idea that Republicans are all just morons is cancerous as fuck. And I'm British - I have no horse in that race. But seeing Democrats actively promote the idea that Republicans are white trash hillbilly redneck bumpkins with sub-80 IQ makes me really dislike those Democrats. Rather than basically claiming superiority over your political opponents, why not try to understand their position, and the circumstances that lead them to believe things different from what you believe? It's supreme arrogance to think you know everything and your opponents know nothing.

For what it's worth, most of the jobs "in solar" are installers. Very much blue collar (also, fairly dangerous work).

Agreed with the rest of your points.

yes you do raise a great point actually. I think my mental model for the fuel economy shift is moving from red geographies to blue geographies (with innovation occurring inside universities and cleantech startups, and the majority of solar panels being installed in bluer states) but you're right in that there's still plenty of blue collar work involved.

I'm curious about the source of your numbers. In particular, see https://www.politifact.com/illinois/statements/2017/apr/25/b... (which has numbers comparable to yours for solar, but 160k jobs for just coal, not counting oil and natural gas, in the US).

Thank you for the link.

Per that document, page 29, there are ~370k jobs in solar, yes. But there are ~160k jobs in coal, ~360k jobs in natural gas, and ~515k jobs in oil. Plus the ~36k jobs in "advanced gas", whatever that is.

Unless you were talking about just the "electric power generation" column?

If you accept that client change is happening, man made, and inevitable, but you believe the best course of action for the United States is to do nothing...do you argue that cold dispassionate position with people that want to open the borders and eliminate capitalism?

Or do you double and triple down on denial so your opponents are busy trying to convince you rather than trying to maneuver you into compromise.

After all, based on progress so far your strategy has been exceptionally successful.

Exactly... one of the big problems is trotting out the weakest possible arguments for whatever view opposes your network's preferred narrative.

It's a "strawman". You see this in fake wrestling: a designedly weak contender is set up to get owned by the audience's favorite protagonist

In this case climate change denial and conspiracy theories are a mainstream opposition.

>"The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." -President of the United States

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/26589529219124838...

Here he is ridiculing climate change as of last week, in case someone wants a more recent example (he missed the 15th anniversary of The Day After Tomorrow by a few months)

> "[..Its cold right now..] What the hell is going on with Global Waming? Please come back fast, we need you!" -Leader and representative of the United States

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/10900742540104048...

Do they still do that? I thought that was a 90's thing.

Also known as a "Squash Match".

If pro wrestling can move on from them, maybe news media should too!

Of all my random childhood / young-adulthood interests, I never expected a Hacker News tangent discussing this one.

The role of "jobbers" or "enhancement talent" (i.e. performers on the show whose role was to make the real stars look good) faded in the mid-1980's.

The industry consolidated, from a collection of regional operators focused on live events, to two main companies with national footprints and a focus on television (i.e. WWF and WCW). Competition heated up between the two, and the "squash matches" that had filled out live event cards were not compelling to the newer television audience.

With the dawn of The Attitude Era (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attitude_Era), squash matches became virtually extinct. They had already become more rare in the preceding years. Much of the Attitude Era can be seen as a postmodern deconstruction of the old-school tropes that came before. In this environment, a group of former-"jobbers" even formed an on-screen faction dealing wit the concept (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_J.O.B._Squad), which elevated them to moderate stardom by breaking the fourth wall for an increasingly-informed audience.

Today, some performers will still never have the same potential for stardom as other top performers. But no one is kept on the roster to always lose. It's too boring, and doesn't really work to enhance the winners.

You are correct, of course. The industry changed only because the "mark" fans "smartened up" and demanded it!

Jobbing is alive and well, especially on the mid-card, but not as prevalent as it used to be.

Related: https://twitter.com/klujypop/status/1018217609010012160?lang...

I see two modes to this. On factual matters (flat Earth, anti-vaxxers, chemtrails), I fully support the "figure it out and print/publish only the truth".

In opinion matters (how much tax should the poor/middle/rich pay, should public higher education be free/cheaper, should we implement UBI, etc), I'm far more interested in hearing from both/all sides, even at risk of some of the fringe viewpoints getting more airtime than currently.

"News" is not the simple reporting of facts, probably never was, and inherent in even the apparent reporting of facts is an interpretation of them (if nothing else by virtue of the facts you select to report upon and then emphasis you give them).

Yeah I rather just see publications own their bias and then come up with my own interpretation to blend them than have a publication do it for me.

I think the zeitgeist right now is people are afraid to fully own their beliefs AND be open to debate.

Right now there's too much fear of repercussion one way or another. Which is only pushing the extremes further.

It's possible to see why anti-vaxxers are afraid while disclosing verified facts.

There is no one "correct" side amongst people and events, only impressions and accounts, which can vary tremendously.

It's also important not to take a side in the news, but to lay out facts and people issues involved as fairly as possible, rather than what happens these days: hiding datapoints, falsifying statements, taking sides and rarely understanding anything about or relating to the people involved.

Perhaps on stories of grievance or accusation, journalists musy play devil's advocate by asking for a response to opposition and ask the question most people are too afraid to ask.

Taking sides is for the editorial, not news, lest it become merely a TV church espousing gospel and seed faith, while the polarized others are turned off and away. Neither group communicates to the other, and neither challenges the others ideas... a dichotomous, divided-and-conquered, atomized society falls apart.

PS: I've been around the sun a few times, and I note a liability red flag whenever a person espouses black-and-white thinking. It's usually an unreasonableness better kept at a distance.

Including "the other side" on such issues is only a problem if you include them uncritically. But that requires a debate, not just airing of opinions as most news is nowadays. Censorship of ideas only makes them grow stronger. Look at antivax - what we needed was a complete and repeated dismantling of their ideas in the mass media BEFORE it became a problem so that people would been vaccinated (in this case with knowledge) against the well-sounding and emotionally compelling arguments of the antivax movement.

So, no, we don't need balanced news. But we need critically inclusive news.

In that case it's the job of the journalist to keep the battle of facts going until one side falls silent or into denial rambling.

I would highly appreciate several angles, but this is extremely hard to do without falling into the "we respect all points of view no matter what" type of stuff.

For example, I would be interested in listening to a reasonable anti-vaxxer. Not the "vaccines-cause-autism" one, (although this point deserves an honorable mention), but someone with more methodical approach. I know it's hard to find a voice of reason in the choir of conspiracists, but who said making good press should be easy?

I also would be interested in listening to a good flat-earther. I see it as a very good mental exercise for the reader: if I had now knowledge about the shape of our planet, could I actually tell the truth from the false here?

Same goes for climate (non)changers, Russian hackers and so on.

Completely disagree. I want the facts, backed by people who know the situation. I do not want “fair and balanced.” Not all sides have equal grounding and I’m tired of this false equivalence.

We are seriously in times where one side denies climate change. There is zero point in giving them time because it elevates their point to being equal to the one backed by actual climate scientists, not industry that has a vested interest, like coal, in continuing to deny it.

> Completely disagree. I want the facts, backed by people who know the situation. I do not want “fair and balanced.” Not all sides have equal grounding and I’m tired of this false equivalence.

However, it's more subtle that that. It is a fact that so-and-so holds this-or-that position or belief, even if that position is wrong or incorrect. Those kinds of facts should be reported on, especially when they encode the beliefs and position of a major politician or political faction. A reporter also cannot outright contradict such a person, except in very clear cases, without seeming partisan, so they have to juggle with the prominence or try to inject a more authoritative counterpoint.

It's a hard line to walk, even when newsrooms were fully staffed.

That’s true, but the other side may have good points in regards to other topics.

If you ignore them altogether because they are a bit crazy in one regard (well, maybe a lot of regards), then you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Right, there is a nuance, but it's often lost today because newspapers want to appear "independent." They are so terrified of appearing partisan, it dilutes their coverage to nothingness, just covering both sides. It too often is:

"Side A said X"

"Side B said Y"

Well, that's of no help to me. I could simply go to those PR pages myself and see what they said.

So this is not about ignoring them, but about not giving equal credit to both view points or being mouthpieces to propaganda.

I have completely different observations. Most of the time sites try to sell me opinion and thoughts of some sort of "experts", but I want pure facts with fact-checking.

If the people denying climate change are the exact same people denying the effectiveness of vaccines, it is likely that their stance is based completely on ideology. I can’t think of another reason the same people would share the same stance on two completely different topics.

The problem with that line of reasoning is that climate scientists have jobs too, and they get money for promoting their viewpoint just as the coal industry does. It's hard to argue coal workers have "vested interests" but science workers don't.

In fact if you investigate it, you'll find a lot of so-called "climate change denial" is not so much denial as skepticism about the robustness and motives of climate science. There are some remarkably famous climate change skeptics you wouldn't expect, like a former head of Greenpeace who wrote an interesting essay that basically claimed oceanic acidification (due to extra CO2 being absorbed) was junk science. I didn't bother digging in to the merits of that specific debate, but when even the former heads of ecological charities are flagging problematic scientific practices, and when I've witnessed quite a bit in other non-climate fields, it's not a big stretch to believe that academia may have been exaggerating or mis-interpreting things to unlock grant money. Certainly other areas of science have developed a big problem with that (p-hacking etc).

All kinds of "absolute tests" are generally wrong.

For instance, your climate change (which was called until a few years ago "global warming") test rubbed me the wrong way because you mentioned the "climate scientists". There is no such thing as a climate scientist because there is no climate science. There is climate research or climate studies but not Science. Science means application of Scientific method: (a) making observations -> (b) formulating hypothesis (falsifiable predictions) -> (c) proving or rejecting the hypothesis through experimentation. Climate studies lack the third step and therefore they are not science.

Should I dismiss the rest of your argument based on my own test of "the person fails to understand the difference between science and ontology"?

The NYT in particular is so flagrant with this. Endless profiles of Trump voters in diners, who are always the same bewildered, inarticulate hicks. We don't need to hear any more from these people.

And who decides who's right? Journalists? They are terrible at that.

I'm living in Switzerland at the moment and I really appreciate swissinfo.ch (don't know much about the other sources because I only speak English).

For example take a look at the news for their upcoming vote: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/in-depth/vote-february-10--2019

They have numerous articles on the issue (urban sprawl) and unmodified opinion pieces from people on both sides of the issue.

It's not a publisher in the normal sense, but if you are looking for news from all sides, I have to recommend, well, allsides.com

https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news

I've found that just browsing through their opposing headlines is a nice balance.

I've also resigned myself to reading multiple articles on the same topic to try and pick out the facts. My least favorite tactic of most papers has been to leave out pertinent facts to better fit the narrative that they're known for, or to simply not cover what should be major news.

Here in Brazil, publications pretend they are publishing the "truth" while they are controlled by a handful of the richest families of the country. I'd like that they at least recognized their bias. They won't get a cent from my pocket.

Maybe the reason that news are controlled by the richest families is that news is so unprofitable only the richest people can afford to provide them.

I disagree. Most issues are in fact not best viewed through a lens of two equal and opposing "sides". Multiple opinions are meaningless (or in fact a net-negative) if those opinions aren't factually grounded.

There's also the fact that the MSM has made complete asses of themselves over the last few years.

Has "Fake News" ever knocked trillions of dollars off the stock market because they ran an unverified story that implied the president would be impeached?

https://nypost.com/2017/12/02/abc-news-corrects-flynn-bombsh...

At some point there needs to more accountability for these organizations than "Oh, sorry about that"

I'm not sure why the media and journalists still get held up to some nostalgic ideal of brave upholders of truth. The majority of news organizations are owned by billionaires pushing their own agenda or giant corporations that only care about profit. Truth is secondary at this point.

Facebook lost a lot of stock value over the Cambridge Analytics scandal and the spread of fake info after it was reported on. Of course, this assumes this was the actual cause of its declining stock value, since it recently increased.

So yes, it has been assumed to have happened.

Indeed. There is way too little news specifically targeted at nr. 4, even though that group is rapidly growing.

Billionaires so it the other way round: buy a paper and tell it what to print.

it appears that you're suggesting that the only sides to politics are the perfect good people (presumably the progressive left), and their evil opposition comprised entirely of fascists, fascist apologists and cynical hypercapitalists. I presume most readers are already aware of this, but that is a highly inaccurate presentation of the range of political positions people hold.

To present politics as a battle of good versus evil is extremely harmful to discourse because it dehumanises the opposition. In my experience, most conservatives and liberals alike are moderate and policy-focused, believing that one approach or another will solve any given issue. Of course you do get extremists, but they are a fringe minority on both sides.