My impression of US politics is that academics and journalists, like everyone else, either have their bottom line already written (i.e. they search for arguments to help their party) or the facts and science themselves become politicized (how do you win with facts if voters deliberately vote against facts?)

If two opposing beliefs are affiliated with the two parties, one of the beliefs being objectively true makes surprisingly little difference, because they are only being used as attire in the first place. At best you get one party labelled as more pro-science than the other. And even then most people think "anti-science" means "anti-scientist-funding", not "anti-truth" or "anti-objectively-correct-policies".