Sane Washing

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see jrnl fail, tho interestingly fox is not listed as offender?!

Is the press ‘sanewashing’ Trump?

September 9, 2024By Jon Allsop

CJR}:

:{:{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.”

:{:{If the word “sanewashing” is not new, neither is the idea that the media is masking Trump’s incoherence. As Molloy noted in her column, she wrote a similar piece—headlined “By reframing Trump’s incoherent, inaccurate ramblings as bland political copy, journalists are carrying water for the president”—in 2020, for the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America; she also quoted from a more recent article in which Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, criticized headlines about a Trump rally that focused on “extraneities” like the weather and Trump’s frustration with the teleprompter, rather than his bizarre rhetoric about sharks.}:

Last week, amid all the sanewashing discourse, other critics expressed related ideas without using the word. The Atlantic’s Isabel Fattal re-upped Goldberg’s column in the context of Trump’s economic remarks, noting that when she read some of the coverage, she could “witness in real time the process of trying to impose sense where there is none.” At the LA Times, Michael Hiltzik argued that media descriptions of another recent Trump appearance—in which he suggested that children are going to school and coming back a different gender—did not “give anything like the flavor of his diatribe,” and called for ignoring his own paper’s rule that “we shouldn’t apply language associated with mental illness to people who aren’t known to be mentally ill.” On MSNBC, Mike Barnicle blasted the media for not adequately covering Trump as a “damaged, delusional old man.” Greg Sargent echoed Barnicle, also in *The New Republic*.}:

:{As I see it, newsroom policies discouraging remote diagnoses of mental health are generally to be followed, even if they shouldn’t curb any and all discussion in this area; also, Trump does have (or at least is associated with) policies that merit scrutiny, however incoherently he articulates them, and—as even some critics acknowledge—there has been at least some sharp recent coverage centering the incoherence. The idea that “the media” as a whole has ignored Trump’s fitness for office is very hard to sustain. :{Nonetheless, I find the sanewashing criticism persuasive, on the whole. Too often, major outlets clean up Trump’s language—especially in shorter formats, like headlines and ledes—to the point where it barely resembles what he actually said.}:

And, if the press hasn’t ignored Trump’s fitness, Sargent made a compelling case, in his column, that it hasn’t subjected his age and condition to anything like the level of focused scrutiny that was applied to President Biden on such grounds. (Sargent deftly illustrated this by swapping Trump’s name into real headlines about Biden.) As I wrote after Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June, Trump was incoherent that night, too, but seemed to get away with it because he showed more energy.}:

If journalists are sometimes sanewashing Trump, why are they doing it? Critics including Molloy and Barnicle have suggested that it has something to do with that old desire to project a false equivalence, or “balance,” between the two leading candidates. Goldberg blamed a “bias toward coherence,” whereby Trump benefits from journalists’ classic conception of their role as being to make sense of the world around them. (“It works like this: Trump sounds nuts, but he can’t be nuts, because he’s the presumptive nominee for president of a major party,” Goldberg wrote.) }:}:

There are other possible explanations. Could it be that elite journalists think so little of Trump that they effectively condescend to him by cleaning up his speech? Do they think that picking meaning out of his word salads makes them sound clever or original? Is he held to a lower standard than his opponents because the latter are expected to speak in full sentences and he never has been? Is Trump sounding incoherent simply old news at this point, in an industry that prizes novelty?}:

Whichever it is—and all these explanations could, theoretically, be in play at the same time—it’s worth noting that the sanewashing phenomenon figures into a debate that is almost as old as Trump’s political career itself, and legitimately thorny: whether to expose news consumers more to his rhetoric, or shut it out. Proponents of the former approach have argued that broadcasting Trump’s rallies live, for example, offers an unvarnished window onto his incoherence; proponents of the latter have argued that the first approach exposes audiences to unchecked lies and gives Trump free airtime. I wrote about this debate earlier in the year and concluded that it has been so circular because there isn’t really a satisfying answer—it felt true to me that many people have become desensitized to how Trump talks, but also that journalists cannot expect people to consume streams of raw information all the time.

The biggest problem, I concluded, was not journalists’ failure to resolve an unresolvable debate about exposure, but their failure to accurately describe Trump’s rhetoric—without resorting to euphemism, for example—and to do so with due prominence. The sanewashing critique speaks to this same problem, at least in part. When I wrote earlier this year, it was in the context of Trump saying, at a rally, that his failure to win reelection would lead to a “bloodbath in the country”—remarks, many critics suggested, that were subsequently sanewashed by allies and pundits who suggested that he was talking metaphorically about the auto industry. I argued at the time that the furor over the phrase missed the point: Trump said many unambiguously dangerous things at the same rally that got far less attention. This problem is still with us, and it still involves blood. }:

Over the weekend, Trump said (again at a rally) that removing immigrant gangs from the US would be a “bloody story”—remarks that got media coverage, but not as much as they merited given their implications. Ditto an explicit Trump pledge to prosecute those he believes “cheated” in the coming election. (Last night, an *Axios* newsletter mentioned this threat in its last lines, having opened with “dueling tax-cut promises” by Harris and Trump that amount to “each candidate trying to make Election Day feel like Christmas morning.”) If sanewashing the incoherent things Trump says is a problem, then so is failing to proportionately coverhis all-too-coherent threats.}:

To whatever extent journalists show people Trump’s unadulterated speech, it will always be part of our job to describe it. At root, the critics of sanewashing are really just asking the media to “report accurately on what we’re all seeing in front of us,” as Fattal put it in The Atlantic. Sections of the media, not least those from which the critics hail, are doing this already; if major outlets aren’t always doing likewise, the fact that they do it sometimes shows that accurate descriptions of violent and incoherent rhetoric are communicable within the existing linguistic and reportorial codes of elite media. (The Atlantic is a highly elite publication, and seems to have little problem clearly describing the things Trump says.)

Tomorrow night, viewers will get an unadulterated dose of Trump when they tune in for his debate against Harris on ABC. Well, somewhat adulterated; Harris will be there too, of course, and Trump’s mic will be muted when she is talking—to the frustration of Harris’s team, which wanted her to be able to grill Trump in real time and also reportedly saw benefit in letting viewers hear Trump acting out. Ironically, it was Biden—who agreed to the terms for the debate before dropping out—who demanded muted mics; even Trump’s opponents, it seems, can’t agree on whether it’s best to shut him up or let him be heard. Unlike at the Biden-Trump debate in June, a “pool” of journalists will reportedly be close enough to the stage to hear the candidates this time. It might end up being their job to tell us what Trump said off-mic. Unavoidably, it’ll be all our jobs to describe what Trump said with the mics on.

Other notable stories:

Over the weekend, the Times reported on an effort by the Heritage Foundation—the right-wing think tank that spearheaded Project 2025, the far-right policy blueprint for a second Trump term (which Trump has recently disavowed)—to seed “falsehoods about the integrity of the 2024 election across social media and conservative news outlets.” In other news about Heritage and the Times, The New Republic’s Kate Aronoff asks why the latter has invited the former’s president, Kevin Roberts, to appear at a forthcoming “live journalism” event about the climate crisis. “There’s nothing wrong, per se, with a newspaper inviting influential right-wingers to join panels,” Aronoff writes, but “looking through Roberts’s own words on the subject of climate change, it’s hard to imagine the case for putting him onstage to talk about it.”

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4 25

Sanewashing is the act of minimizing the perceived radical aspects of a person or idea in order to make them appear more acceptable to a wider audience. The term was initially coined in online discussions about defunding the police in 2020, but it has come to greater prominence in critique of media practices relating to Donald Trump in the 2024 United States presidential election. Journalism organizations and media commentators have suggested actions both readers and writers can take to mitigate sanewashing.

History

The earliest usage of sanewashing dates to 2007 in a blog post written by academic Dale Carrico.^[1][2] The first known usage of the term in a political context is credited to a user on r/neoliberal, a Reddit forum for neoliberals, in 2020.^[1][3] In 2024, journalist Aaron Rupar was credited with being the first to use the term in the specific context of media reporting of Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign.^[4]

Journalism school and research organization the Poynter Institute defines it as "the act of packaging radical and outrageous statements in a way that makes them seem normal", and suggests it is analogous to greenwashing or sportswashing.^[5] Matt Bernius, writing at Outside the Beltway, as asking "Where's the line between paraphrasing and 'sanewashing'?", ultimately concluding that it is "a dangerous form of bias".^[6]

2024 United States presidential campaign

Paul Farhi wrote in The Atlantic, in reference to the term, that reporters have a "tendency to render the Republican candidate's most bizarre and incoherent statements into cogent English, shearing off the crazy in a misleading manner".^[7] Kelly McBride, in discussing whether NPR is guilty of sanewashing, wrote that the news organization has been criticized for what it describes as "packaging Trump's ideas into news stories as if they are sensible suggestions".^[8] Columnist Will Bunch wrote in September 2024 that he thought sanewashing "has all but clinched Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2024",^[9] although their actual word of the year was "polarization".^[10]

The Associated Press published multiple perspectives on sanewashing in an October 9 article, with some media critics advocating for more unfiltered quotes and clips of Trump and others pushing back on whether the media has been guilty of the practice leading up to the 2024 election.^[11]

Examples

The Hill reported that Nate Silver suggested Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz was sanewashing JD Vance by saying "nothing about the Republican ticket's conspiratorial claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets, for instance" in their debate.^[12] At the same debate, MSNBC accused JD Vance of sanewashing by "interpreting" for Trump.^[13]

MSNBC suggests The New York Times' coverage of an answer Trump gave to the Economic Club of New York was sanewashing: "After one member asked Trump a very specific question about the rising cost of child care, the Republican presidential candidate responded with a two-minute rant about tariffs, the deficit and fraud. Yet The New York Times chose to cover Trump's comments [by] headlining their piece on the event, 'Trump Calls for an Efficiency Commission, an Idea Pushed by Elon Musk'. The Times' deliberate choice to lead with that detail and only mention the former president's incoherence briefly in the article drew sharp criticism from media pundits."^[13] The Week criticized Associated Press and CNN over their coverage of the same answer at the event, saying that they had attempted to "impose sense where there is none" with headlines such as "Trump Suggests Tariffs Can Help Solve Rising Child Care Costs in a Major Economic Speech".^[6]

Trump mentioned that, if elected, in his administration Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would work on "[investigating] what is causing the decades-long increase in chronic health problems and childhood diseases, including autoimmune disorders, autism, obesity, infertility, and more". The New York Times did not mention autism in its reporting of this portion of Trump's speech. Parker Molloy wrote in The New Republic that the mention of autism alongside Kennedy should be a red flag given his promotion of false theories linking autism and vaccines. In omitting mention of autism, Molloy says that "the Times took an obvious nod to a conspiracy theory and turned it into a normal-sounding policy proposal".^[14]

CNN reported a Trump post on Truth Social as a straightforward news story about his agreeing to debate his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris. David Bauder writes for The Associated Press that, in reality, the post "rambled on about the 'radical left' and 'fake news'".^[11]

Many television and radio outlets covered a Trump speech in Wisconsin with a soundbite quote from him that "No parent should be forced to send their child to a failing government run school". The Washington Post instead used the headline "Trump mixes up words, swerves among subjects, in off topic speech". WBUR said "Though the speech was ostensibly about school choice, it took Trump more than half an hour of speaking to get there. He first meandered through a confusing, and confused stream of consciousness that touched on his belief that Kamala Harris is a Marxist, that for some reason he wants to meet her father. He dropped a line about migrants being 'the real murderers', and a claim about how migrants are 'coming out of jails in the Congo'. He talked about Elon Musk and Venezuelan tar".^[15][16]

Speaking in the context of undocumented migrants, in October 2024 Trump said he believed people who commit murder have "bad genes", a concept that Mediaite characterized as referencing eugenics.^[17] The New York Times published a headline reading, "In remarks about migrants, Donald Trump invoked his long-held fascination with genes and genetics." Other journalists sharply objected. Former Times journalist Andrew Revkin called it "headline lunacy", while former Chicago Tribune editor Marc Jacob said the Times was passing racism off as "a deep intellectual curiosity about genetics." Mehdi Hasan remarked, "the sanewashing of Trump continues."^[17]

Causes

Michael Tomasky of The New Republic told the On Point radio show that it is important to note that sanewashing is not a conspiracy or an act of collusion between Trump and the media. Rather, it happens because the normal conventions of campaign journalism do not account for candidates that do not stick to "a certain pattern and a certain norm" of speech. On the same show, host Meghna Chakrabarti explained that representing the various tangents of Trump's speech can be a challenge in a medium with time or space constraints, like a radio show or newspaper.^[16]

The New York Times has suggested that Trump's incoherent remarks receive little attention because of how common they have become. According to The Associated Press, the idea that journalists have become accustomed to things Trump says that they might find shocking from other politicians is termed "the banality of crazy" by political scientist Brian Klaas.^[18][11]

Remedies

Rob Tornoe wrote in Editor & Publisher that one technique journalists can use to avoid sanewashing is the truth sandwich technique.^[19] Kelly McBride, writing for the Poynter Institute, listed various approaches, including to "let the quotes stand", to "point out the lies and also the purpose they serve", and to "identify the journalistic purpose" of a quote.^[5]

Parker Molloy wrote in The New Republic that readers, not just journalists, also have some responsibility to help counter sanewashing. According to her, readers should "seek out primary sources", and "support news outlets that prioritize accuracy over access or the appearance of 'balance'."^[14][6]

Michael Tomasky of The New Republic praised The New York Times for its in-depth October 6, 2024, piece analyzing Trump's speeches since 2015 with a focus on Trump's mental fitness, and advocated for continuing to focus on this story of mental acuity.^[20]

References

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[### Sanewashing - Wikipedia

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Sanewashing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanewashing#:_{:text=Sanewashing%20is%20the%20act%20of,acceptable%20to%20a%20wider%20audience.})

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[### The 'sanewashing' phenomenon

Editor and Publisher

https://www.editorandpublisher.com › stories › the-sane...](https://www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/the-sanewashing-phenomenon,252177)

Oct 1, 2024 — a term tied to criticism of how media outlets cover Donald Trump's rambling answers and lengthy speeches — “sanewashing ...

[### SANEWASHING Slang Meaning

Merriam-Webster

https://www.merriam-webster.com › slang › sanewashing](https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/sanewashing)

Jan 23, 2025 — Sanewashing refers to the practice of making irrational, extreme, or otherwise problematic people or ideas appear more reasonable or normal ...

[### media “sane-washing” of Donald Trump

Mother Jones

https://link.motherjones.com › public](https://link.motherjones.com/public/36678690)

Sep 10, 2024 — In recent days, I came across what seems to be a new term to describe much media treatment of Donald Trump: “sane-washing.

[### Sanewashing? The banality of crazy? A decade into ...

AP News

https://apnews.com › article](https://apnews.com/article/trump-media-election-rallies-facts-kamala-harris-e906e990b5dcfe44b5e672336fe82b32)

Oct 9, 2024 — Molloy first used the phrase “sanewashing” this fall to describe a tendency among journalists to launder some of Trump's wilder or barely ...

[### The Insensitivity of the Term "Sanewashing"

Verywell Mind

https://www.verywellmind.com › what-exactly-is-sanew...](https://www.verywellmind.com/what-exactly-is-sanewashing-11680535)

Feb 20, 2025 — “Sanewashing, similar to brainwashing and similar to gaslighting, it's looking at people and trying to make them conform to whatever they feel ...

[### Is the press 'sanewashing' Trump?

Columbia Journalism Review

https://www.cjr.org › the_media_today › trump_incohe...](https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/trump_incoherent_media_sanewashing.php)

Sep 9, 2024 — 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- ...

[### Sanewashing in the media: the coverage that normalizes ...

Media Bias Detector

https://mediabiasdetector.seas.upenn.edu › blog › sanew...](https://mediabiasdetector.seas.upenn.edu/blog/sanewashing-in-the-media-the-coverage-that-normalizes-trump-s/)

Nov 1, 2024 — Sanewashing is when problematic statements by public figures are normalized or downplayed by the mainstream media.

[### Beware the sanewashing ahead on Trump's second term

Substack · American Crisis

390+ likes · 3 months ago](https://margaretsullivan.substack.com/p/beware-the-sanewashing-ahead-on-trumps)

Beware the sanewashing ahead on Trump's second term. Mainstream journalists do essential reporting but pull their punches. Plus: what you can do right now.

[### How to avoid sanewashing Trump (and other politicians)

Poynter

https://www.poynter.org › ethics-trust › sanewashing-me...](https://www.poynter.org/ethics-trust/2024/sanewashing-meaning-donald-trump-journalists/)

Sep 12, 2024 — Sanewashing is the act of packaging radical and outrageous statements in a way that makes them seem normal. Here's how reporters can eschew ...

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mma

Steve Bannon and guest argue rising bond yields mean “tough times ahead” if Trump doesn't secure trade deals and “get government spending down”

04/10/25 2:52 PM EDT

### Ben Shapiro: “If you wanna see a real bull market, the president should fire Peter Navarro today”

04/10/25 12:32 PM EDT

### “Art of the Deal”: Fox propagandists spin wildly for Trump’s “huge” tariff “win”

04/10/25 11:51 AM EDT

“Art of the Deal”: Fox propagandists spin wildly for Trump’s “huge” tariff “win”

Written by Matt Gertz

:{:{Published 04/10/25}:

Fox News’ propagandists cheered President Donald Trump’s tariff climbdown as a “huge win” that shows he was playing “3D chess” and executing the “Art of the Deal.” Meanwhile, reporters at outlets including Fox pointed out that Trump had “capitulated” out of fear that his unilateral imposition of massive taxes on all of our trading partners was triggering a collapse in the bond market.

Trump announced on Wednesday a 90-day pause on the massive tariffs he had proposed the previous week on dozens of countries and farcically described as “reciprocal,” with the countries instead subject to a still-high 10% tariff during bilateral trade negotiations. At the same time, he increased tariffs on China, the largest U.S. trading partner, to a total of a whopping 145%, and left unchanged sectoral tariffs he has proposed or implemented on steel, aluminum, and cars (he also proposed this week additional tariffs on lumber and pharmaceuticals).

The president and his top advisers had repeatedly said that no pause was being contemplated, and the abrupt reversal reportedly took even some close aides by surprise. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, who had been defending the planned tariffs in a House hearing when Trump announced the pause, said he had not been informed of the policy change beforehand.

North Korean state TV anchors would blush at the fervor with which Fox’s hosts announced their support for the move on their programs that night.

“We begin with the art of the deal -- told you this was going to happen,” Fox host and Trump political operative Sean Hannity crowed at the top of his show. “It was inevitable. Donald Trump's in a perpetual state of negotiation. A huge win for the president. A huge win for the country. His biggest accomplishment of the second term and there have been many.”

:{:{Video}:

Citation

From the April 9, 2025, edition of Fox News' Hannity

Laura Ingraham trumpeted the tariff shift as “Trump’s 3D chess move,” claiming that the president was “on a roll” and “thinking three steps ahead” while his “naysayers” were left “grasping at straws.”

“Trump created maximum leverage for himself, and now his team’s sitting pretty, taking meetings and doing deals that put America first. And if we don't like how the negotiation is going, our partners have seen the kind of pain we can cause, and they're motivated to do what we want, or else we'll make them feel the same pain,” offered Jesse Watters.

Their narrative that Trump is cooly executing a deliberate plan is total nonsense — he was responding to “a mass sale of bonds” the night before which indicated that “people are losing confidence in the U.S. economy” and could have triggered a financial crisis, as Fox Business’ own senior correspondent Charlie Gasparino reported earlier that day.

“I want to tell you right now that Donald Trump outsmarted the world,” Gasparino said on Fox after Trump’s announcement. “Trust me. I'm an American, I support my president. But that's not really what happened here from what I understand.”

“It's the bond market and the sort of lending markets that's the plumbing of the economy. And those markets were imploding last night and that's why we have a 90-day freeze,” he explained.

“It is the White House who capitulated, based on everything I hear, and all of my sources,” Gasparino reported in a second segment. “And the reason why is because of the bond market and what happened last night.”

IFrame Content

Gasparino’s reporting is consistent with that from outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN.

Indeed, Trump himself publicly acknowledged on Wednesday afternoon that his reversal came because people “were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid,” and in particular were “queasy” over the bond market.

That reality is apparently toxic for Fox’s Trump shills.

When Watters’ Democratic co-host Jessica Tarlov pointed to the bond market gyrations on Wednesday’s edition of The Five, he told her, “You don’t even know what you’re talking about. You don’t even know what a bond is.”

Likewise, Hannity mocked the “stupid people” who deny that “this was the [Trump’s] plan all along,” which he claimed to have “pretty much understood because I know the guy so well.”

Rather than a brilliant plan carefully executed, we are left with a trade agenda that has unclear goals, will cripple small businesses, and will raise prices for American consumers on everything from coffee to cars — and could change at any time based on the whims of one mercurial man.

But that man is the focus of Fox’s cult, and so its high priests are genuflecting and offering sacrifices.

:{:{many vids?]}:

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