There are cases where the viewpoint "Of course one side is always right and the other isn't", has been entirely correct. For example, there was real controversy for decades over the idea that cigarettes caused cancer, that second-hand smoke caused cancer, and so on. One side was mostly good-faith research and the other side was almost entirely paid shills trying to muddy the water.
Climate change seems to be mostly the same situation.
The Soviet propaganda machine is another example - it presented an intellectually sophisticated "side" which was dictated by politics, not any genuine interest in reality.
I think we have to be careful, because propagandists know that most people want to be even-handed, and they take advantage of this to make fringe views seem credible. This makes "there are two sides, the truth must be somewhere in the middle" an entirely unreliable intellectual shortcut.
So if you want to argue that US right-wing think tanks are no worse, in terms of bias and distortion, than academia, I think you need to make that case in more detailed terms, and not just dismiss the very idea that one side could be more systematically biased than another.
Climate change seems to be mostly the same situation.
The Soviet propaganda machine is another example - it presented an intellectually sophisticated "side" which was dictated by politics, not any genuine interest in reality.
I think we have to be careful, because propagandists know that most people want to be even-handed, and they take advantage of this to make fringe views seem credible. This makes "there are two sides, the truth must be somewhere in the middle" an entirely unreliable intellectual shortcut.
So if you want to argue that US right-wing think tanks are no worse, in terms of bias and distortion, than academia, I think you need to make that case in more detailed terms, and not just dismiss the very idea that one side could be more systematically biased than another.