"Your presumption that all journalists have an anti-authority bias is not a good reason."
I don’t presume this nor a[m] I presuming that is the case here. I am offering it as a possibility.

As I note in this comment, your choice of language when referring to the journalist and what he had to say gives us good reason to believe that you are presuming that. You also mentioned being aware of one’s own biases and deploying countermeasures to them. It seems to me you were late in deploying countermeasures against your own apparent bias against journalists.

[J]ournalists have biases just like all of us.

Absolutely. But whether they as a group or as individuals have the specific bias you seemed to claim they have, and to what extent those biases pop up in their journalism, are debatable.

But your willingness to just swallow it all as presented probably says something about your own biases.

You are mistaken about a lot of things.

Before I “swallow it all as presented”, I do some filtering. First, before actually reading a story/watching a newscast (beyond a headline or topic summary), I generally have a three-part analysis of identifying bias on the part of the source: if the source is known to be biased (Breitbart, Polygon, or Fox News for example), I generally presume some bias unless I have reason to believe that the specific journalist has a history of going against that bias (e.g. Shep Smith); otherwise, if I can identify the specific journalist and that journalist has a known history of bias, then I presume bias is in the story itself. After identifying the source and the writer, if certain biases are assumed but the story seems to go against those biases or is unrelated to those biases, I largely waive the presumption. If no bias is presumed but the headline says something that seems biased, then I take the rest with a grain of salt. Even if I presume bias, I may still continue to read if the presumption isn’t terribly strong. After going through the bias filter, I’ll make a determination as to whether the story is believable. I also determine just how believable/unbelievable the story is in part based on the evidence I’d need to change my mind. This analysis starts from the headline/summary and continues as I read through. There is a threshold where, if something gets too unbelievable, I’ll stop reading, but that’s a very high threshold. When I finish reading, I make a final determination about how believable/unbelievable the story is, where the burden of proof lies, how high that burden of proof is, and what further research may be necessary. I also determine what effect the information would have if I presume one way or the other. Only then do I truly make an assumption on whether it’s true, plausible, possible, implausible, false, impossible, or undecided, which is almost always subject to change if additional information comes to light should that new info change anything substantial.

A lot of this is subjective, but it helps reduce the impact my biases have on my research, and I almost always leave room for me to change my mind. I’m actually rather slow to pass judgment.

Also, you seem to be confusing my actually believing something and when I accept something as true for the sake of argument. Note what I actually said (emphasis added):

For the purposes of this argument, we assume the allegations are true unless you give a good reason to disbelieve them.

While I find the allegations plausible at this point in time, what I was saying is that, in an argument, I accept the allegations as true (unless they are implausible or are contradicted by other evidence) in order to discuss them on their own merits, even if I personally doubt their accuracy or believe there’s more to the story. Occasionally, I will even pretend something is true even if I know it’s false for other reasons if in doing so I can refute the logic of the other person.

And the fact that you use phrases like bootlicker make that more likely in my view.

You must have me confused with someone else. I did a search of this page for the term “bootlicker” just now. Outside of this comment, I never used that specific term even in a quote. I did say this:

The fact that you immediately assume that any journalist who has anything negative to say about an authority figure, even one you don’t know, must be “smug”, “anti-authority”, and “pompous”, and that anyone outraged on their behalf must be “an eager cop hater” and a “sycophant”, shows what an ass-kissing asshole you are.

But that was a reference/response to you saying this…

Your unquestioned swallowing of whatever this smug anti authority so-called journalist bellows out of his pompous mouth shows what an eager cop hater you are.

…to an AC who did call you a bootlicker (again, that wasn’t me). It wasn’t meant to be taken as a serious insult. I’m not good at the whole name-calling thing, anyway. I was just calling out your hypocrisy for getting upset over being called names and others’ supposed biases and assumptions by pointing out some of the times you showed bias, made assumptions, and engaged in name-calling in a similar manner as you used. I apologize for the crass language—I try to avoid doing so—but I was trying to make a point.