In my opinion it sounds a lot like what would be concluded by somebody too distant from the subject to notice details if being fed entirelly by the “opinion forming” newsmedia that has does propaganda for a specific side.
I’ve seen the exact same thing when I lived in the UK and certain newspapers kept publishing stories about very specific poor people who had morally repreensible behaviours and painting it as “all poor people are like this” (for example, they showed entire families who had lived of social security for 3 generations as portray it as a “something the poor do” even though in a country of 50 million there was a grand total of 4 families which had had 3 generations living of social security) - plenty of people who were capable of reasoning (but lacked skepticism or any analytical thinking) would, as they were meant to, conclude that “the poor are lazy and lack morals”.
People will most definitely and very genuinelly have their opinion formed against a group or ideologic domain they don’t really know well, by being fed stories of extreme cases labelled as “from that side” and their simpleminded reasoning pushed to conclude those extreme cases are actually representative.
(The same thing is done to a lot of people who genuinelly believe themselves “leftwing” - the dominant “left” thinking in places like the US and UK is shaped by “opinion makers” that claimed the “left” label, rather than being something people build by themselves “from basic principles” - it’s not by chance that the thinking of Chomsky is a lot more all-around consistent and generic than what comes out the self-proclaimed lefties in the Democrat party).
Genuine Free-thinkers are incredibly rare nowadays.