The all-important question in today’s world is what news sources to trust?
I used to believe exactly like you do and would respond exactly like you do. I read (and still read) all the same new sources you do. I agree, we are both a reasonable, logical and intelligent people. We believe a different set of facts.
I would suggest rather than just blindly trusting third party journalists to summarize a situation for you that you dig into it yourself.
When I started doing that, I found a lot of the things that I had been trusting them on, I was misled. A lot of times the supposed fact checks only look at one very narrow aspect of a situation and ignore the larger truth.
Unfortunately, it has become much harder to find information as Google itself has become quite biased in how they display information. Almost every search only returns me Democrat supporting sources. You could see this to an extreme extent a few weeks ago when you did a Google search on Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, and both searches only showed pro Kamala Harris info.
A huge percentage of old school media are all now extreme left. Reuters, AP News, ABC, CBS, NyTimes, etc. the cause of this is driven by their ownership as well as by highly liberal editorial staffs.
NyTimes purged all their conservative staff 3 years ago remember? NPR had a whistleblower point out that there was not a single employee there who was not a Democrat… And was punished for it and had to resign.
The middle of the road person from the ’90s would find any of these publications to be extreme left today. Things are continually shifting very quickly to the left, due to the continued “progress” of socialist indoctrination in public schools.
When I spent all my time online, the Democrat fantasies were fairly persuasive. Once you start doing a lot of things in the real world, you see a lot of stuff that stops making sense. This is the primary reason for the rural urban political divide. You have a lot of urban people who believe the fantasy castles like I did controlling policy and pushing suicidal ideas that affect everyone and are not able to hold up to the sunlight of reality.
One of the primary factors most successful entrepreneurs point to is the willingness to change your mind when you learn you’re wrong.
I have tried to shrink my ego down as much as I can and not attach it to a business or political idea of any kind. Here’s a random selection of just a few items I’ve changed my mind on… https://joelx.com/things-ive-cared-about-that-i-have-changed-my-mind-on/18306/
When you attach your ego to a certain idea or set of ideas, it is many times too painful to admit when you’re wrong and change it and people just hold on blindly.
And you are correct that losing faith in the mainstream media does make you more vulnerable to certain small bits of disinformation when they come like the cat thing. Usually though those can be corrected fairly quickly as has happened.
But when you stop believing the mainstream media blindly, you can see everywhere a systematic concerted effort to push a single agenda and to bury anything that contradicts it, and twist things beyond recognition to support it.