Is "Pew Research" reliable?

[warm istanbul]

I have been following Pew for quite some time and I have noticed they produce a lot of click bait and have some rather strange findings in some of their polls: their insistence that 100 percent of Americans have an educated opinion on any given issue in a country where almost half of people can't even find Nevada on a map, their ridiculous claims about a 40-point gender gap among millenials (including that the majority of young men voted GOP in the 2018 midterms), their tendency to show outlying opinions on a variety of issues (the lowest numbers for support of Trump's Muslim ban of any poll, while simultaneously some of the highest numbers for support for general racist attitudes). The fact that nobody else seems to ever criticize it or its methodology makes me even more suspicious, since it is frequently held up as this inviolable resource for public opinion, yet I have never once heard an actual accountable statistic (i.e. predicting how Americans will actually vote) quoted from them. That, and their general clickbaity-ness makes me really suspicious of whether they can be valuable as a resource for much of anything.

I fully admit that this is just a personal bias and I can be convinced otherwise though.

[warm istanbul]

Thanks for the replies guys. Admittedly my main benchmark is the American National Election Studies (I don't pay attention to most polls) so I may be jaded on this, but I have noticed that ANES questions usually are multiple choice. They will ask respondents to rate a policy or a belief on a five or seven point scale, with people choosing the middle options being largely apolitical/apathetic. Pew on the other hand forces everyone to choose a yes-or-no answer, which to me makes the results seem rather ridiculous (for instance, when they asked about Trump's Muslim travel ban they found 62 percent against and 37 in favor. Apparantly less than one percent of people have no opinion or are conflicted, even though most people probably don't even know what the hell the question means).