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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 cover his 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.”
- Last week, Harris did two interviews, sitting for the first time with a Spanish-language outlet—Uforia, the audio division of TelevisaUnivision—as well as for a radio show hosted by the comedian and media personality Rickey Smiley. The New Republic’s Alex Shephard argues, however, that Harris is still bypassing large national outlets, and should change tack—because media scrutiny is good in itself, but also because her current strategy is serving her campaign poorly. This strategy is “no different from the one employed by Biden during his disastrous reelection campaign,” Shephard writes, one that hid Biden from the press not because he was old, but due to a “self-destructive feud with the media” on the part of his aides.
- In media-business news, the Texas Tribune, a state-level nonprofit outlet, announced plans to “create, partner or merge” with smaller community newsrooms, starting in Waco before expanding to Austin. Elsewhere, James V. Grimaldi, an investigative reporter at the Wall Street Journal, is leaving to take over as the top editor of the National Catholic Reporter; the Post’s Jeremy Barr has more. On the media beat, Natalie Korach, of The Wrap, is joining Vanity Fair as a media reporter. And The Fine Print, a newsletter covering the media industry in New York City, announced that it is pausing publication. Gabriel Snyder, its founder, cited financial and personal reasons.
- Late last week, a man who had been charged with harassing and stalking two journalists with New Hampshire Public Radio pleaded guilty—the fourth individual indicted in the case to do so. (Late last month, one of the individuals was sentenced to more than two years in prison.) The case revolved around vandalism and threats made at the homes of an NHPR reporter, her editor, and her parents after she published a story detailing claims of sexual misconduct against a local businessman; he was not among those charged, but a “close personal associate” was.
- And for The Observer, in the UK, Jack Apollo George, a freelance journalist, reflected on helping an AI company train its models to produce better, more accurate prose. Taking on the job was “a little like being told you were going to be paid a visit by Dracula, and instead of running for the hills, you stayed in and laid the table,” George writes. “But our destroyer is generous, the pay sufficient to justify the alienation. If our sector was going up in smoke, we might as well get high off the fumes.”
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