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.

I see more pushback, but also find CBS and ABC to be relatively objective.

This mapping has proven useful

https://www.adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/

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?

What "the" other direction? There isn't a single dimension here.

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.