CNN has gone so far downhill imo due to this. In the past five years I've seen a shrinking gap between news and opinion, where articles w/o the label are very clearly editorialized. It lowers the quality of the product and at least for me, I no longer read it as much.
That said, journalists are just humans so it's a difficult problem, especially in the heightened political climate we've had.
That seems like a preposterous claim. Those are classic regime television stations. And I find this diagram biased.
Also, "middle" or centrist is not the same as objective. The path of least extreme disagreement is not the same as the truth (ask a Christian: he'll tell you that Jesus is the truth and that the world hates Jesus). Besides, the middle of what? The neoliberal paradigm? The current spread on offer?
Fair point - these dichotomies are often false or manufactured.
However I believe that, to a much greater extent than citizen support for particular political issues, media bias tends to polarize along party-line dimensions because of overlapping power structures.