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It would be funny, but I think this "one foot in a bucket of ice, the other in a bucket of lava" approach to neutrality is part of why political reporting has become so incredibly polarizing. It leads to increasingly extreme outliers being given a platform when they probably would have just been ignored before.

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it parallels the US court room. each side going all-in and leaving it to the judge / jury to measure the relevance of whats being said.

Only the news channels dont interact directly in front of the viewer so it's like a courtroom where you only listen to one lawyer talk. You have to go to a different room to hear the other lawyer talk, and they are probably talking about the topics in a different order and with a different kind of focus

This analogy perfectly describes our news outlets.

And then we wonder why people are so ill-informed and lacking nuance in their understanding of issues.

That form of neutrality was mandated by law up until 1987 under the fairness doctrine, so it's unlikely it's responsible for any new trends.

The fairness doctrine produced a lot less polarization, or at least that's the widespread belief.

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