Out with the Scold, In with the Skewer

Salon used to be one of my go-to sources for liberal/progressive news and information.  But then I started seeing more and more clickbait links with their over-heated, reactionary headlines, and I stopped looking at it as much.  The site seemed to be ramping up the outrage and becoming a shrill scold.

I guess Patton Oswalt had a similar experience:

It feels a little frustrating that a site like Salon that I used to always go to for great news, great commentary, did turn into a caricature of what a lot of really dumb conservatives used to say it was. That’s really disturbing to me because I don’t want it to be. And I’ve been saying this over and over again.

Apparently, unbeknownst to this non-Twitter subscriber, Oswalt and Salon had been going at it in tweet form for quite some time. The interview I linked to above, dubbed a "Peace Summit," is a pretty long sit-down with Oswalt and Salon's Editor-in-Chief, David Daley. They discuss a lot of different topics that require a bit of background knowledge of current events in comedy to follow, but I think Oswalt sums up the crux of his argument quite nicely here:

I hate to talk in terms of our side, this side, that side. But our side, the liberal progressives, the open-minded people –  I don’t want us to be the scolds and the shushers. That was always the role of neoconservatives and the religious fundamentalists, to restrict and remove words. I don’t want our side to be the one that’s parsing language.
It just really, really bothers me, if the liberal progressives have now become the scolds. We were the Grouchos! We’re not the Margaret Dumonts — and we’re turning into the Margaret Dumonts on a lot of levels. That lets the misogynists and homophobes and racists seem like the rebels: “Well, we’re saying what people can’t say anymore.” We should be having way more fun with language and jokes and going too far. If our side starts doing that, then I think we’re fucked in terms of moving forward as a society.

So what do you think?  Does Oswalt have a point?  Does Salon?

What can we learn from them both?