Ask Lemmy

As a (roughly) centrist myself, I don't think they hate us. They just see us as an obstacle to progress. Which we are, but we're also an obstacle to backsliding. Even from within it's easy to see that centrism is a weak position and it's not surprising it would be despised by those with strong convictions.

But me, I'm fine with being an obstacle. If they think their way is better, they can prove it; then they'll have my support.

so brave of you to stand up and support the position that 'everything getting worse is good, actually.'

Is there is something that I miss here?

Lemmy is a left-wing echo chamber. I consider myself as a centrist. I'm pro same sex marriage, abortion and few other lefties things. But once I say that the unchecked illegal immigration is a problem I get called a fascist, racist and whatever it's trendy on the left side.

The controversial part is equating "centrist" to "least biased". Being a centrist is a political position, and like all others, it comes with its share of bias.

Beside, the "center" views depend in the country, year, and even on who you ask. A man can go from right wing to center to left without changing his stance on anything if the countries politics shift right, and the reverse is true. There were right-wing communists in the USSR, tho they were not right wing by capitalist standards.

There are objective ways to judge a news outlet: Whether they name their sources, whether they've been known to post updates and errata when an info they've posted turned out wrong, whether they're independent, state-funded or dependent on a company, and in the two later cases, are the state or company known to make use of their influence on the news...

And the website quoted by the bot accounts for some of these... But political positioning, while worth mentioning, shouldn't be used to calculate the reliability of an outlet. Doing so doesn't fight bias, but just favors some bias over others.

Im going to get skewered for this... I just assumed that the dislike of least-biases media was a reflection of how people (generally) don't like their world view challenged. It is easy to see that on the right - because I'm an outsider. It may be less easy for me (and others) to see from the inside.

"The left" on Lemmy is unfortunately dominated by an extremely rigid and pretty outdated brand of Marxist-Leninism which tends to reject nuance and compromise in order to "protect" their extreme and reactionary stances on a number of issues. These types run some of the biggest news and politics communities and swing the ban hammer very freely.

Without getting too into the political science weeds, more contemporary views on leftist philosophy essentially holds that every anti-capitalist framework kind of boils down to various degrees of harm reduction within various material scarcity models. MLs don't like this because it pokes a lot of holes in their revolution fetish and denies them the fan service they crave. This is why they almost seem to hate liberals and centrists more than actual fascists and right wingers. Because the right gives them purpose, righteousness and validation, whereas liberals give them difficult questions.

All news will be biased, but a news source that doesn't make it's bias clear (probably for general status quo) can be harder to pick out where it's bias is influencing what it says, or doesn't, and how it says it and the weight it gives to what.

To hit at the root of your question: most people further left than Centre Left want to see large systemic change to the systems we live in. Centrists are generally happy with the systems in theory and think that they need small tweaks for better results, not wholesale root and branch change to economic structures.

bcuz they're stinky doo doo heads

I would recommend reading or listening to Noam Chomsky's Understanding Power. It is a compilation of several of his Q and As about his ideas about the US political and media systems. He has a whole book about the media called Manufacturing Consent, but Understanding Power will give you the lowdown.

Essentially, all mainstream US media is beholden to capitalistic (for advertising) or state (for funding) forces, so a person should always be aware that news sources are never going to print something that is against its own interest. Things like LGBTQ rights and right to abortion don't put news outlets sources of money at risk, so they're safe to print, but you'd be hard-pressed to find something that challenges, for example, the military industrial complex.

I'm not doing it much justice but that's a very very general and incomplete jist of why it's good to be skeptical of the mainstream media in general.