I don’t think it’s very useful to look at things that way. I find misinformation/disinformation on all sides. On some subjects, the right is worse than the left, and others it’s the opposite. There are varying degrees of trustworthiness from different media outlets on the left and right as well.
The thing is, you can’t spot misinformation on your own side if you don’t give a fair reading to the other side’s rebuttals. If you assume information that comports with your worldview is true, and information that doesn’t must be misinformation or disinformation, then you are very susceptable to misinformation and disinformation from your side.
Let’s take Tucker Carlson as an example on the right. I don’t watch him much (only occasional Youtube clips since I don’t subscribe to Fox News), and when I do it’s generally with an eye towards seeing how he’s spinning the news. He’s good at it. He generally doesn’t straight-up lie - his disinformation is more of the form of exaggerating small things that work against the left, downplaying the failures on the right, assuming the worst motivations of anyone who disagres with him, putting straw-man arguments in people’s mouths then mocking them for what they didn’t say, cutting off guests when they have what looks like a good argument against his point, etc. I don’t believe a single thing he says unless I independently verify it. And even if he’s telling the truth I assume he’s ignoring or downplaying countervaling evidence.
Keith Olbermann is a similar figure on the left. They are both polemicists and rhetorical bomb-throwers, and nothing they say should be believed without independent verification. The same goes for any partisan outlet on the right and left. They all have an agenda, and they all have biases. Assuming one side is all lies and one side is all truth is a ridiculous way to form a worldview.
On something like climate change, I see both sides spinning their party line furiously. One side tries to downplay climate change or claim it isn’t happening at all while the other side claims that every weather event that people don’t like is proof of climate change, and they exagerrate the risks and exagerate the positive effect of their policy prescriptions.
I’m sure I will now be accused of ‘bothsidesism’, which is itself a propaganda technique to force people from even considering the merit on the other side of an argument. Partisans on both sides of the aisle do their best to drive their followers into epistemic closure. Looking at both sides fairly should be praised, not mocked.
On the Democrat side, we have an example from this week: The Biden administration has attempted to re-define ‘recession’ to NOT mean two quarters of consecutive negative GDP growth, which has been the standard my entire life. Wikipedia changed its page to remove the old definition, then locked it from editing. Now we are all supposed to know that there is NOT a recession, and I’m sure soon anyone who says the US is in one will be guilty of ‘disinformation’.
The denial of the Hunter Biden Laptop’s existence was disinformation. The letter from ‘50 former national security officials’ calling it Russian disinformation was itself disinformation. But I’m also open to the fact that some of it may be disinformation from ‘my’ side, whatever that is.
Scroll up a few messages to see what I said about it in that early thread. I admitted that whilemthe laptop itself seems real, and at least some of it’s contents had been validated, it would be a mistake to assume that therefore everything on it was true, and held out the possibility that it was ‘salted’ with disinformation by someone. Therefore, you couldn’t trust anything on it until it has been independently verified.
We live in the age of disinformation, It hits us from any direction, Everyone has a narrative, and everyone is spinning. Anyone who thinks their own side isn’t doing it is fooling themselves, And the only defense against it is the free flow of information and a determination to read and hear from both sides.
Why do you think I’m on the SDMB engaging in debates with you all? Because being pitted like this is FUN? It’s about the least pleasant thing I do. But I don’t know of a better way to engage with smart people who think differently and learn their perspective. Have you ever tried going to a right-wing message biard and seriously defend your ideas? I guarantee you won’t enjoy it, but on occasion you might gain some insight into some legitimate points the other side might have.
BTW, one of the reasons going down the character-assassination path in attacking your opponents is that it puts you in a position where it is very hard to back down from a position. It forces epistemic closure. That makes the people who do it more narrow-minded and immune to new evidence. Aside from the fact that it’s assholery, it’s just not good for your mind. The spirit of open inquiry requires you to look at arguments fairly and assume your opponents are approaching a debate in good faith, Once you’ve called someone a blithering moron, it’s really hard to admit that they might have a point, however small it may be.
If an argument is so obviously stupid that it’s not worth your time, just move on. You don’t have to engage with flat earthers and moon landing hoaxers. But resist the temptation to verbally lash the person, because that just hardens positions, closes minds, and does nobody any good.