Denialism,Pseudo-Skeptics - Disillusoned, intellectually lacking or dishonest??

Not sure whether to post this in A&A, or Skeptics. (Or perhaps even Pop Science?)
(Or after hours?:p)

Each time I see a media report regarding, in particular, science I find myself hard pressed to find one that actually represents the science it's supposedly reporting. Indeed, in scientific issues that have a political movement associated with them (AGW,Creationism/Evolution,Vaccinations) the standard of reporting usually stinks. People are misquoted, taken out of context, quote mined and, it seems, one media outlet parrots uncritically what another says without checking anything. I'm not just referring to tabloids here. Though, I must admit I find it terrifying that tabloids are allowed to spout such nonsense as they tend to have the larger volumes of uninformed audiences. Science is pretty much the only topic I have enough interest and background knowledge of to know whether the reports are accurate. It makes me wholly wonder whether anything written about anything by certain journalists is even in the slightest bit reliable - is it solely a science and religion thing?. If it isn't, I can't help but think of that as being an absolute disgrace, but, hey, such is life.

Right, now that the ranty bit is over with. I cannot help but find it amazing that humans are so capable of spouting nonsensical crap. Take deniers of any form for instance (evolution,climate,HIV etc) if you look at their arguments, they always follow a similar pattern : Conspiracy, BIG science, no scientific consensus, political movement, religion etc etc. HIV denial is harmful to human health and does cost people their lives. However, given that the WHO regards Climate Change as the biggest threat to human health (unsurprising really) it's pretty much the denialist movement in Climate science that are ultimately going to be the most harmful. Hence, why I'm paying more attention to these guys.

I understand that most of them probably have political or corporate reasons to deny the science, but it's not just them I want to understand : Why on earth, do ordinary independent people get so easily roped in by the nonsense? In particular the pseudo skeptics, those who haven't got a ideological motivation or bias but seem to think that the strawman arguments presented by the denialist community actually hold water as a science. To take a very common everyday examples :

Scientists said there would be no snow as the earth warmed up.

Anyone who even thinks critically about that should see the obvious flaw in that statement that you'd really have to wonder if scientists are such idiots. Who knows, maybe they are? But I can't see such a statement in a peer reviewed journal . Of course the pseudo skeptics seem to get the impression that that was what the scientists claimed. There are tonnes of ****ty arguments out there that are on par with creationist junk science but that doesn't stop people from spouting them. It's ok for most of us as we can simply choose to ignore them after they've being presented for the 55th time, but for climate scientists they have to debunk the nonsense again and again and again and again... pretty much wasting their valuable time in the process. More so, climatology like evolution has gaps, but as Climate is evidently so important it is vital that we fill as many gaps as possilble. The denialist movements is really an awful impediment to filling these vital gaps. If a contrarian gets a paper published (they usually cry censorship if it's blocked) then some poor soul has to waste their own time in doing a step by step rebuke of the papers which arguably should never have been published. The biggest loser though is the genuine skeptic who publishes a paper that is well written,well presented and not full of gaping errors and/or scientific strawmans but it doesn't get the attention it deserves because of the more vocal dissidents who basically waste everyone times by having them to correct the same crap over and over.

Right-eo, I went slightly off topic there but the point of all this is that denier and pseudo-skeptics aren't a rare breed. The problem, I have though is ascertaining whether they are being deliberately ignorant and dishonest, or whether they're just disillusioned and suffering plain old confirmation biases. By the way, my main way of distinguishing between a skeptic and a pseudo one is that the latter seems to have the balls to pass a quotation in mainstream media as scientific statements. If you haven't met one of these people in real life, then I really really envy you as right now I'm surrounded by em. They're all over the internet but that I can easily ignore; it's the everyday people that I can't! If they're being dishonest then obviously communication is a waste of time. If they're disillusioned what do you think is the best way to free them of it? Even more so though, how can I discern whether they're being honest or not?

I used climate science as an example in the OP, but really this applies to all forms of pseudo quackery.