There is, and always will be, conservative and liberal natures. Sort of the two feet you need to walk around. Sometimes you need to be guarding what you have, other times you need to open up things. A taoist book advises "always sense, 'too much?,' 'not enough?'" as a way to find balance in life, and that's the natural function of different temperaments. To everything, there is a season...
But media doesn't feature conservative/liberal interactions where the background assumption is "we're all in this together, and let's see what we can do." Genuine dialogue is a phenomena completely banished from appearance in the public space. Nobody sees this kind of discussion, and nobody ever will if Media has its way.
Oh, we do get this insipid "bi-partisanship" which, in practice, turns out to be at best completely useless for addressing real-world problems. And more often another looting of the public's wealth and/or rights. But we don't get to hear ordinary people hashing things out together, with fact-checking and reason and respectful back-and-forthing going on.
We get this instead:
A highly polarized, highly exaggerated, and largely falsified political spectrum. With both poles based purely on ideology. Ideologies which themselves are never quite defined, except through innuendo and caricature.
Then Media derives an imagined "Center" which is somewhere between these two, quite irreconcilable, poles.
Makes for great entertainment. Makes for great distraction. Makes for keeping people out of any meaningful say in public policy. Makes for keeping people divided and conquered, labeling each other with labels which possess fictive values.
The politicians accept this situation of a falsified political scale, with its caricature of "left" and "right" and the mythical "center" between the two. Some just bow to it; others work it, and work with it. But they all buy the frame, and use it to talk among themselves and to us.
On real earth, the majority, the true "center" just wants a decent life and a fair shot; don't mind if others have the same (even want that for others); and for the Big Picture things to work right and fairly most of the time.
Which isn't an ideology of any sort at all. You look at polls, and time and again, the "liberal" issues -- which really just boils down to basic human decency -- wins by anywhere from bare majorities to landslide majorities. Yet, through the science and magic of propaganda, and false narratives, the majority of opinion is defined, not only as a minority, but a bit screwy as well.
I saw a recent example of what could happen if we had an adult version of Left and Right playing on our tv. I gather he's a libertarian, climate-change-denier, but he said something to the effect, iirc: "Look, tell me it's the soot problem we have to fix. I believe soot is a problem. I don't believe your global warming. Soot: pollution, I see it. Health-problems, bad for me and my kids. I can get with fixing that."
But you see, that'll never be heard on Media Central. They need the division on the topic, not the solution.
And there's the real bias in media, at least in my observation: Getting the public as evenly split as possible. It used to be clear majorities thought human-generated climate change is upon us. Then there's been a long series of "scandals" and alternate explanations, etc, and now it's near 50-50 on climate change.
Think back to when near 80% opposed the bailouts. Then 24/7 for three weeks, there were talking heads on "oh we will all die unless the bailout happens" and opinion became near split. Then the government, with a polarized public, went ahead and did what they wanted to do in the first place.
Before the Media blitz, they couldn't do it and keep a pretense of Democracy. Now, the public's divided, hey "let's get all bi-partisan." Which, like "reform" is a code word in DC for "screw the people, help our business associates."
There's lots of examples like that. The real purpose of the artificial "balance" is to keep us divided. If Media did the minimum due diligence you'd do if you were buying a pair of shoes, the Republican scam would long ago have been laughed out of the public space. But that doesn't matter, rational and reasonable approach to governance doesn't matter, because it's the division of the electorate which is what's needed.
Hence "balanced journalism." Not honest journalism.
The other bias, of course, is to completely exclude the public from having any meaningful information about, and voice in, deciding matters of foreign and economic policy and practice.
They'll let us have social issues to discuss, as these are often emotional things, identity-related things, so people can be set at each other's throats pretty easily. But economic and foreign matters? It's like there's a big sign Media flashes which reads "Keep Out! US Citizens, this means You!"
So the trick is not to pay much attention to the divide-and-conquer features they feed us and instead figure how'll we'll force them to talk about the big things they want us kept out of.
On the way to that, we really have to stop just following along using the terms of reference, entirely falsified, our political enemies choose to foist upon us; to stop fighting the fights they pick for us and instead pick the battles and battleground ourselves.