it does come off as a bit one sided becuase the implication is that when you say "progressives do this" you are also implying that non-progressives don't--even if its not explicit. As someone who sits squarely in the middle, I see this heavily on both sides. A better formulation would be "partisans aren't known for wanting to be neutral or muted about their causes." If they had hired more conservative journalists they'd have the exact ssame issue but in the opposite direction.
(full disclosure--I haven't watched CNN or any other new channel since the Iraq war, i.e. 19 years ago. The all burned their bridges with me then, and I've never been back, so I'm assuming its true that CNN has a tilt left. I've never seen it myself.)
In my view, I have two critiques about mainstream-ish progressive liberal politics.
1. Insistence that everything is political and politics is everything. I’m sorry, sometimes folks are just reading into things too hard. From poorly shoehorned diatribes about sexism in second-rate Vox articles, to tirelessly policing vocabulary to avoid impure etymology, progressives outpace conspiracy theorists in their desire to pattern-match everything into their own personal political causes.
2. Intolerance to tolerance of other viewpoints. Again, it feels like a purity thing: “I can’t be friends with someone who is friends with someone who said something problematic once.” I’m not saying cutting people out of your life based on their bad behavior is bad, but the guilt-by-association to judge other people’s friends and acquaintances I find detestable and very cult-like.
I don’t think these are fringe behaviors on the left right now. I think they’re widespread in fairly mainstream, if not quite the most mainstream, of media, and common among heavy social media users. The closest right-leaning analogues very fringe and much less influential.
Of course, there’s another thing that’s tiring, which is having to constantly reassure everyone that I am still very liberal even though I critique left-leaning folks.
>From poorly shoehorned diatribes about sexism in second-rate Vox articles
This got really bad during the Trump presidency. One could be reading the least "political" article imaginable, and suddenly see something condemnatory about Trump that smugly assumes that everyone reading surely agrees. Nowhere was safe: Film reviews, book reviews, articles about cooking, travelogues, minor human-interest stories, you name it.
>Of course, there’s another thing that’s tiring, which is having to constantly reassure everyone that I am still very liberal even though I critique left-leaning folks.
During the aforementioned Trump years I thought at times about creating /r/ihatetrumpbut, a collection of articles/posts/comments in which the author felt the need to declaim "I hate Trump, but [something Trump/US government did may not necessarily be 100% fascist/evil/a bad idea]". Hey, maybe I'll get more motivation to pull the trigger in November 2024!
You're right when you divide the population into the extreme ends, but this doesn't prove symmetry.
I don't have the link at hand but studies demonstrate that progressives in general are far more politically interested and active versus anybody center to right of center, minus the far right.
In that group center to center-right, there's less idealism and more pragmatism, and sometimes plain indifference.
this has more to do with the “ Intolerance to tolerance of other viewpoints”. The right isn’t gonna come to the discussions until the left calms the argumentative behavior. I’m center right and any discussion with someone on the left almost always gets pushed into argument territory.
(full disclosure--I haven't watched CNN or any other new channel since the Iraq war, i.e. 19 years ago. The all burned their bridges with me then, and I've never been back, so I'm assuming its true that CNN has a tilt left. I've never seen it myself.)