Tom Ellis below hit the nail on the head. If you are not a skeptical person, and if you have poor critical thinking skills (a description which includes far too many Americans due to our weak educational system) you will believe everything you hear and see on OAN, News Max, Fox, right wing radio, and right wing podcasts. It is in the interest of right wing media when the President is a Democrat to scream loudly that crime is at an all time high (false), inflation is at an all time high (false), climate change is a hoax (it isn't), the economy is horrible (not true), and so on. Then the pollsters call these folks, and guess what they believe? While freedom of speech is one of our most precious values, it is also true that a democracy cannot function well when media outlets are allowed carte blanche to lie, present only one side of a story, promote falsehoods, ignore objective truth and fabricate stories. I don't know exactly how to fix this given our current Congress (in which Republicans don't even believe that Biden is the President). But there was a time when most people got their news from journalists who tried to present a balanced picture of the facts. We even had a law that required networks to report both sides of an issue. It wasn't perfect, but we did not have such a divide between the people who research issues, and the people who drink the magic Cool Aid.