That is a serious oversimplification. If assessing, say, Marine le Pen or Donald Trump supporters it is easy to reach such conclusions. Careful analysis nearly always yields more nuanced views. Over the decades and centuries it has seemed apparent that extremists tend to be bi-modal, with a large cohort that is well educated and another that distinctly is ignorant. Generally the extreme left seems to have highly educated people in social subjects like sociology and the extreme right tends to have more adherents narrowly educated in fields such as business. The more broadly focused and/or scientific the education the less extreme tend to be the views.
I quote no sources, the only way to be convinced is to do ones own research. Years ago I recall trying to prove those points with data. It became quickly evident that extremists do not accept proof, regarding the proof as itself somehow falsified. Both extreme right and left are very much the same in that respect.
Portland has more than its share of extreme lefties and I wouldn't want to see them anywhere near power just as I don't want to see extreme right wingers near power. I have noticed the same sort of thing you have. Another thing I have seen with extremists of any stripe is a tendency to see the world in fairly black and white terms.
I do believe it's healthy for extremists to have their say in the political discourse though. One of the things I saw during the era in American politics when "liberal" became an evil word was fairly moderate views were labeled as extremist left by extremist right wingers and they got away with it. It helped ratchet the US to the right and probably ended up ratcheting the entire world a little to the right.
When the public is exposed to the entire spectrum of ideas, it becomes much harder to demonize moderate views as extremist nuttery. Various political stripes might disagree with the moderate position because it doesn't fit into their philosophies, but that's different than demonizing.
Back in the mid-20th century both of the major US political parties had their extreme wings, but those people were mostly kept from power. Occasionally someone did get into a position of power like Joseph McCarthy but those people are remembered for being too extreme. The political debate mostly was around right of center and left of center ideas. Most people consumed the same news, so there was little disagreement with the core ideas that made up a person's world, the disagreements came with the conclusions to those ideas. I use the term "ideas" instead of "facts" because the news has never been completely factual. But it was more consistent and closer to the middle of the political spectrum then.
The changing of FCC rules in the 1980s to eliminate the Fairness Doctrine that required broadcast news outlets to give equal time to both political party's perspective on any political story, followed by changes to the radio and TV station ownership policies that allowed a few people to buy up large numbers of stations, followed again by satellite TV, and finally the internet has created an environment where people select which news panders to their biases and only watch that. Between conservative talk radio and Fox News, there are a number of people on the right end of the political spectrum who believe different "facts" from the rest of the country. These "news" outlets did the first thing any religious cult does, it tells it's people "only believe me/us, the other guys are just going to lie to you". Then the cult masters can spin an alternative reality based on distortions of fact and get people worked up about things that never happened and distract them from real problems.
In the modern internet landscape it is possible to get a fairly factual view of the world, but it takes reading a number of sources and always fighting against internal confirmation bias. Knowing the difference between an assertion and an argument is also critical.
There were news outlets that tried to stick to the Fairness Doctrine, even though it was gone, but as the political spectrum shifted and one end became less and less based on facts and more on assertions, the whole thing broke down. The right and left as represented by the public figures are not the same. There are people on the left wing who are just as nutty as some of the far right. I know some here in Portland, but the extreme left isn't in power and way too many of the extreme right have a disproportionate voice.
I think it was fivethirtyeight.com that did an analysis of the political ideologies in Congress from the early 1970s to the present. The Democrats have bounced around a bit and they swung left somewhat when the Southern coalition left the party entirely. But if you look at the curve over time, the Democrats haven't changed all that much in political ideology. On the other hand the Republicans have moved steadily to the right. What the US has today is the difference between an extreme right party and a center left party. The needs of the far left aren't being listened to, but neither are the center right. The center right are left with the choice between someone way to their right or the Democrats who have traditionally been the "enemy" but are many times ideologically closer to their views, even though they are a bit to their left.
This is probably one of the things feeding the independent movement in the US. Independents have grown from around 5% to close to 40% of registered voters.
Back to the news. On the right, I see a lot of assertion passed off as argument and politicians are actually basing legislation on this. On the left, the news tends to give you the facts first, then launch into opining about those facts. Rachel Maddow has risen to the top of the cable news heap in the last few months in part because of the implosion at Fox, but also because she is very careful to get the facts straight. I have seen her many times lay out very complex things in clear language most people could understand, then have a guest on who is an expert and her first question is always "did I get any of the facts wrong?" Even people who don't agree with her politics admit she usually gets the facts dead on.
I don't always agree with her editorializing on the issues of the day, but I have great respect for her ability to take complex issues and lay out a factual explanation of them. As someone with a fairly strong background in engineering and the hard sciences, the lay people's explanations of things on TV often has me pulling out my hair in frustration, but she has explained things I knew a fair bit about on several occasions and she's gotten the factual details right about 90% of the time. On TV news that's a unicorn.
Left leaning news is heavy on opinion, but there is more fact and less assertion based reasoning. Though there are some opinions that I think are overly based on distortions of the facts. The false equivalency is dangerous and trying to maintain it kept the US presidential race close in 2016. The race was really between someone who was not well liked, but was one of the most qualified people for the job ever to run vs someone who had no clue what the job entailed or really much of the skills needed to do the job. By blowing one sides foibles out of proportion and massively playing down the other's, we ended up with a completely unqualified president.
I'm not saying Hillary Clinton would be a good president. She has some temperamental issues that may have gotten in the way, but she wouldn't have been an international embarrassment.