> 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.