I just noticed that one of the news communities here discourage the use of least biased/centrist news sources and I saw some people who put that they hate centrists in their bios.
All is that is kind of weird to me and does not make sense, as I thought that all sides should encourage ideas from centrists and least biased sources.
"Centrist" is a phony identity. It's a put on, like journalists who pretend to be "objective".
The whole thing is a reification of the concept of political "spectrum".
Self identified centrists are usually people who've only been recently engaged in politics. They imagine themselves as neutral arbiters; the consumer that chooses the best ideology. They represent themselves as above politics, when in reality they're operating on an elementary understanding.
Politics is values. The left values equality while the right values hierarchy. No human being has ever valued the midpoint between hierarchy and equality.
There is no political center between the current left and right parties in the United States. For example, one is pro-choice the other is pro-life. There is no middle on that issue. This is the post-truth world and we are now in different realities. You can't believe half of the Q stuff and then believe half of the Bernie stuff. If you don't follow politics enough to have an opinion you wouldn't call yourself a centerist.
Describing yourself as a "centerist" in today's conditions usually means you support Trump but are too embarrassed to say it out loud/you know you'll receive backlash for saying it.
One is that the baddies don't call themselves the baddies. Apparently, there's some right-wingers who refer to themselves as "centrists", because they pretend that their position is entirely normal.
The other reasoning is that the leftists perceive right-wing rhethoric as so objectively bad that someone saying they have a political opinion and that opinion is in the middle, because both sides are valid, to them just means that person is being ridiculous.
Mind that the meanings of "left" and "right" and even "center" varies a lot between countries, so it depends a lot on the context.
What many comments miss is the fact that the "left-right-spectrum" is way to simple to describe the modern political landscape. If you want to place a range of opinion into whatever direction, you will end up with contradictions.
I want you to imagine two political parties: The Petting Dogs Party and the Kicking Dogs Party (for the sake of conversation, I have not assigned them to any real world party). Obviously, the PDP would consider anyone who joins, or even supports, the KDP as being horrifically evil. Like, if you wanted to show a character is evil in TV, you have them do what the KDP do all the time. It's literally cartoonishly evil.
Now, in the political context of America, there are only two parties. The only way the KDP don't gain power is if the PDP gain power instead. So anyone who doesn't help the PDP gain power is either supporting or allowing the KDP to gain power.
In this context, a centrist will usually fall into one of the following categories:
They refuse to vote for either side, allowing the dog kickers to kick dogs.
They lied about being centrist because they don't want to admit they kick dogs.
They lied about being centrist and are trying to convince more people to kick dogs.
They openly kick dogs, but insist it's normal to kick dogs, so the KDP is the centre.
As you can see with those categories, it's a sliding scale of evil. The only non-evil option is to not kick dogs at all, which requires voting for the PDP.
Of course, if you have a Looking At Dogs Party, it gets messier. You'll often see people vote for the LADP where they would have voted for the PDP just so the KDP doesn't get in. But in America, the LADP does not exist.
To me, it seems the right have been getting ever more extreme in the ugliest ways imaginable. The left, then, has to decide whether to become more inclusive of those who lean somewhat right but are feeling alienated at this point. Do they take in the refugees, or do they stick to their principles and leave a void in the middle? In short, it's an identity crisis and people are taking sides.
As a Canadian, I look at US politics and see only a centrist and right party. In some ways, the Democratic Party is further right than our Conservative Party, though the latter would certainly want to change that if we let them. There are some Democrats who are uncompromisingly left like say Bernie Sanders, but they are in the minority.
That's just my personal opinion, but centrists are often enablers of right-wing extremists/fascists. Since they don't really have their own opinion and political stance, they just kinda take the average of the left and the right-wing. This starts to become a big problem, when the right suddenly radicalizes, and the centrists now also move further to the right.
Especially in the US, where both parties are globally "right" in both political and financial aspects, a lot of time claiming to be a centrist means that you like capitalism and bombing other countries but you support LGBT causes and are pro-choice. I think, online and especially on lemmy, that the vocal left-wing voices (correctly) see this still as aiding the right but being too cowardly to admit it.
This also ties back to the MLK quote about the 'white centrist' being the biggest obstacle to his movement, because they may say the right things and appear to be helpful but take no action for the movement. By staying centrist and trying to meet in the middle, would lend credibility to the voices on the other side.
Centrists have no spine to position themselves clearly. They constantly love to say both the right and left are equally bad, which is an insanely amount of false balancing to say wanting equality for all and deporting people and/or punishing people for their gender are things that are in any way comparable.
The controversial part is equating "centrist" to "least biased". Being a centrist is a political position, and like all others, it comes with its share of bias.
Beside, the "center" views depend in the country, year, and even on who you ask. A man can go from right wing to center to left without changing his stance on anything if the countries politics shift right, and the reverse is true. There were right-wing communists in the USSR, tho they were not right wing by capitalist standards.
There are objective ways to judge a news outlet: Whether they name their sources, whether they've been known to post updates and errata when an info they've posted turned out wrong, whether they're independent, state-funded or dependent on a company, and in the two later cases, are the state or company known to make use of their influence on the news...
And the website quoted by the bot accounts for some of these... But political positioning, while worth mentioning, shouldn't be used to calculate the reliability of an outlet. Doing so doesn't fight bias, but just favors some bias over others.
Broadly because the entire dynamic of left-wing partisanship in the US - both for the politicians and for the voters - is built around the binaristic idea that the only alternative to supporting the Democrats is supporting the Republicans, and that doesn't work if they admit that there are more possible positions than just those two.
It is easier to dismiss someone's argument outright if you can put them in a box without needing to engage with anything they're saying
Historically and particularly in the 1990s, Democrats were sort of corporate dogshit, so a lot of the left got used to opposing them (often bringing up MLK's "white moderates" speech)
There are a lot of shills on Lemmy who really want Trump to get elected, and do it by attacking the Democrats "from the left" with various dishonest talking points, and if you point out that any of what they're saying is objectively false, they will call you a centrist as a way of dismissing you (see point #1)
The center isn't automatically right (often in the American political spectrum it works out as the average of killing all the immgrants and free school lunch, which is not a happy central point to reach). But also, simply applying a label to someone and dismissing them doesn't automatically mean you're right either, no matter how popular it may be.
As a (roughly) centrist myself, I don't think they hate us. They just see us as an obstacle to progress. Which we are, but we're also an obstacle to backsliding. Even from within it's easy to see that centrism is a weak position and it's not surprising it would be despised by those with strong convictions.
But me, I'm fine with being an obstacle. If they think their way is better, they can prove it; then they'll have my support.
Lemmy is a left-wing echo chamber. I consider myself as a centrist. I'm pro same sex marriage, abortion and few other lefties things. But once I say that the unchecked illegal immigration is a problem I get called a fascist, racist and whatever it's trendy on the left side.
Im going to get skewered for this... I just assumed that the dislike of least-biases media was a reflection of how people (generally) don't like their world view challenged. It is easy to see that on the right - because I'm an outsider. It may be less easy for me (and others) to see from the inside.
"The left" on Lemmy is unfortunately dominated by an extremely rigid and pretty outdated brand of Marxist-Leninism which tends to reject nuance and compromise in order to "protect" their extreme and reactionary stances on a number of issues. These types run some of the biggest news and politics communities and swing the ban hammer very freely.
Without getting too into the political science weeds, more contemporary views on leftist philosophy essentially holds that every anti-capitalist framework kind of boils down to various degrees of harm reduction within various material scarcity models. MLs don't like this because it pokes a lot of holes in their revolution fetish and denies them the fan service they crave. This is why they almost seem to hate liberals and centrists more than actual fascists and right wingers. Because the right gives them purpose, righteousness and validation, whereas liberals give them difficult questions.
I would recommend reading or listening to Noam Chomsky's Understanding Power. It is a compilation of several of his Q and As about his ideas about the US political and media systems. He has a whole book about the media called Manufacturing Consent, but Understanding Power will give you the lowdown.
Essentially, all mainstream US media is beholden to capitalistic (for advertising) or state (for funding) forces, so a person should always be aware that news sources are never going to print something that is against its own interest. Things like LGBTQ rights and right to abortion don't put news outlets sources of money at risk, so they're safe to print, but you'd be hard-pressed to find something that challenges, for example, the military industrial complex.
I'm not doing it much justice but that's a very very general and incomplete jist of why it's good to be skeptical of the mainstream media in general.
All news will be biased, but a news source that doesn't make it's bias clear (probably for general status quo) can be harder to pick out where it's bias is influencing what it says, or doesn't, and how it says it and the weight it gives to what.
To hit at the root of your question: most people further left than Centre Left want to see large systemic change to the systems we live in. Centrists are generally happy with the systems in theory and think that they need small tweaks for better results, not wholesale root and branch change to economic structures.