Can you provide some specific examples that inform your viewpoint?
The position you're staking out here is called postmodernism, and is based on the idea that there is no objective truth. There is only my truth and your truth. This is a highly ideological and contentious position, in fact to people who don't subscribe to postmodernism, postmodernism is an objectively untrue belief system.
Biden shows all the symptoms of being in a state of advanced dementia. People who work with him say he's only cogent and capable of handling presidential business for a few hours a day at best, and that's probably an exaggeration. It is objectively true that he has dementia by the definitions of those words. When journalists refused to report that or pretended the problems were caused by other things, they weren't merely preferencing personal narratives of equal value to any other narrative, they were explicitly manipulating their readers in order to achieve their ideological goals via subterfuge. Which is why nobody rational trusts them anymore.
And aren't you the one just repeating an ideology? All you say I have heard many times as dogma of the current right-wing movement. And as you offer nothing else but insistence on it, is there any more to these claims? Where do you think for yourself and depart from it? What is your reasoning beyond 'nobody rational' would disagree with the movement - a strong signal of reason-by-mass-psychology.
The essence of reason is another voice, which connects our intellect and knows, through experience and training, that the first voice is not trustworthy. It doesn't say, 'nobody rational would disagree with me'; it says, 'my perception and knowledge are limited and I need to base my beliefs on much more'. The core of reason and rational thought is resolving a dilemma: how do we find truth if our perceptions and beliefs are unreliable?
What's worked very well and is widely accepted is to use something outside ourselves: publicly verifiable fact.
> objectively untrue
> nobody rational
Those words aren't evidence, they are just signals that it's a dogma. A rational discussion would bring in evidence, and talk about its strengths and weaknesses, and talk about the strengths and weaknesses in your ideas. It would include curiosity about others' ideas.
I'm sure you have plenty of good ideas (and so do I), but it's impossible to explore anything if you won't.
> journalists refused to report that
I saw plenty of reporting about his age-related problems, for example in the New York Times and Fox News. Both got a lot of heat for it.
As for seeing stuff in Fox News, I don't think that particular organization is what the people who started this thread were thinking of.
Instead it was "loud noises heard".
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2024/07/13/media-rea...
There are many more likely, alternative explanations for any delay. Of course they shouldn't conclude anything about anything without evidence; they shouldn't say 'assassination' as soon as someone hears a loud bang.
In fact, many report Trump was hit by a bullet when, last I knew, we had no evidence that it wasn't shrapnel that cut him (but I haven't really kept up with new developments).
You don't need extensive investigative journalism to work out what happened there, and indeed most other news outlets reported it correctly immediately. It was only the usual suspects who had trouble writing informative headlines. There is no excusing that behavior: they didn't want to report it correctly as an assassination attempt because they have come to exist purely to fight ideological war against the Republicans and everything they say or do is passed through a "does this hurt Trump" filter first. So whilst a man bled out on the stalls they were reporting it as if the cause of the events were a great mystery.
Also notice how totally disinterested they've been in the story of the shooter(s). We can infer a lot about why.
Following such a movement is a sure way to do a lot of bad things. And you can see the movement insists that not only you follow it and I must follow it, but if journalists don't immediately repeat its dogma, they must be shut down. Independent thought is not allowed.
Mass dogma like that is nothing more than a means to power for the leaders, who without any check on them - whatever they say is ardently believed and argued for, a requirement of acceptance, and really the whole point of the movement - can steer people wherever they want.
The only protection in life, the only way, is to think independently for oneself. Facts are our anchor to reality; straying far from them is certain to lead to mistakes. And we need reject anyone who says otherwise. Such movements, which insist on adherence, are particularly dangerous.
Only once there was overwhelming evidence and they looked like complete morons for originally portraying it as “old man scared by noises”