Respectfully I don't think the majority who would self identify as left or left leaning hold extreme positions. If you are experiencing such I would question with whom you are engaging, where, and how.
For example twitter is absolutely driven by assholes flinging rebukes at one another for likes and short messages and no meaningful threading don't make for reasoned discussions.
For the last point look how this discussion has begun by painting everyone who disagrees with you with a broad brush. This itself doesn't lend itself to reasoned discussion.
Twitter is an echo chamber amongst a lot of journalists, and so is Fox news. Shock-jocks used to be in the fringes (like Howard Stern), but that seems to be the only way to be profitable in the mainstream media these days.
It is depressingly sad that local newspapers which were once pillars of their communities and able to fund deep-dive investigative journalism that enabled reporting on complex issues and corruption have now almost entirely vanished. Removing the profits from newspapers and replacing it with algorithmic sale of ads on the internet at scale has not, in my opinion, been a net good for society. And I don't think it is possible to address these issues in the current political environment.
Your accusation cuts both ways, against both tribes.
Beyond the casual, there's an entire right wing information ecosystem. There's no left wing Fox News/OAN/Newsmax. And don't say "main stream media". That's just not true.
Between 2000 and 2010, the internet grew up and Big Tech began to take over the advertising segment. People stopped buying local newspapers as much, so fewer journalists were funded to do any kind of complex reporting. In 2010 the internet hadn't completely taken over video content, as bandwidth to the average home was only just getting to the level to sustain a couple of HD streams.
Between 2010 and 2022, the internet has now taken over virtually everything. Cable TV is dieing. Virtually everyone I know now consumes their content online, barring the elderly that don't know how to operate a tablet or phone. Local content no longer gets funded, but oh does fringe content get clicks! Software realizes, hey, we can sell ads on those clicks! Suddenly people engage in SEO and fringe content is now massively profitable. The sane voice of reason in the form of Walter Cronkrite is lost. Public discourse becomes more polarized than ever.
I think the blame for this lies in large part on Big Tech. Promoting content by optimizing for clicks is a very different selection criteria than a previously well established news editor (be it paper or TV) trying to do a good job while protecting their organization's reputation. Neural nets have no conscious voice in the back of their weights saying "hey, maybe that's a bad thing to promote".
The world is forever changed. For better or worse, there's no turning back from the world we have created.
Nuts. The mainstream press has always shaded pro-conservative. Look at how preciously the mainstream media treated Trump. They rarely reported Trump accurately, often editing him for clarity. The mainstream press was and is extremely charitable to Trump.
Got any reference I can use to look this up, because it smells fishy.
Whereas I lived through the first Trump admin as an adult, and I could see the difference between what was reported (which mostly made sense) and what Trump stated himself, which was stream-of-consciousness gibberish.
Don't try to gaslight anyone on this issue. The press cleaned up what Trump said, and reported the cleaned-up version. The worst thing they could have done was report Trump's exact words.