Who’s extreme?

With regard to Rob Christensen’s article about the partisan divide in the U.S., do you agree that MSNBC pundits (he names Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews and Ed Schultz) are really comparable to the hacks on the right (Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly)? Or is my insistence that the two sides are not equally and misleadingly extremist, that the MSNBC bunch is instead much more sensible, good-spirited and even-balanced (however “liberal” they might be) than the Fox-ites, merely a reflection of my own deep-seated biases?

In the same vein, are Drudge Report and Huffington Post simply mirror images of each other? In other words, is the (facile?) argument that both sides have their extremes really “fair” or even honest? One extreme is not necessarily the exact counterpart of the other. I don’t view MSNBC as “extreme” in the Fox or tea party sense of the term. Doesn’t one of them appeal to the better angels of our nature, while the other appeals to the “”worser”? Does that question reflect an unrealistic, terribly blinkered bias? I’d like to think not.

C.E. Edmondson, Davidson