September 9, 2024

Is the press 'sanewashing' Trump?

There's a hot new term doing the rounds among media critics:
"sanewashing." The term itself actually isn't new, and it wasn't born
in media-criticism circles, per se; according to Urban Dictionary, it
was coined in 2020 on a Reddit page for neoliberals (which Linda
Kinstler wrote about recently for CJR), and meant "attempting to
downplay a person or idea's radicality to make it more palatable to
the general public." (It was deployed in discussions around, for
example, "defunding the police.") Recently, though, various observers
have applied the term to media coverage of Donald Trump. Aaron Rupar,
a journalist who is very active on X, has been credited with coining "sanewashing" in this specific context, but the term appeared to
really blow up last week, after Parker Molloy wrote a column about it
in The New Republic. (She expanded on the idea as a guest on the
podcast Some More News.) The word has since been picked up by media
bigwigs including Paul Krugman and Rachel Maddow, and appeared in
outlets from Ireland to India.

As applied to Trump, the idea is that major mainstream news outlets
are routinely taking his incoherent, highly abnormal rants--be they on
social media or at in-person events--and selectively quoting from them
to emphasize lines that, in isolation, might sound coherent or normal,
thus giving a misleading impression of the whole for people who didn't
read or watch the entire thing. In her column, Molloy called out CNN
for sanitizing a Trump screed about tomorrow's presidential debate and
the New York Times for omitting an allusion to a conspiracy theory
about vaccines and autism from its summary of a Trump pledge to tap
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to help make health policy; since then, she and
others have applied the same analysis to coverage of Trump's
incoherent remarks--particularly around the costs of childcare and a
proposed Elon Musk-led "efficiency commission"--at an economic forum
in New York. "This 'sanewashing' of Trump's statements isn't just poor journalism," Molloy wrote. "It's a form of misinformation that poses a
threat to democracy."

https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/trump_incoherent_media_sanewashing.php

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