How 'major mainstream news outlets' are 'sanewashing' Trump’s 'highly abnormal rants': analysis

09 September 2024

Donald Trump and his MAGA allies repeatedly accuse the mainstream media of promoting "fake news" and going out of their way to unfairly attack him.

But Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin vehemently disagrees: the Never Trumper has argued that many mainstream reporters aren't scrutinizing Trump aggressively enough.

In a September 8 post on X, formerly Twitter, Rubin wrote, "It's utter journalistic malpractice if not outright bias to refuse to ask Trump at the debates about his threats of bloody mass arrests. It's an easy call for ABC. I have no idea if they are up to it."

That same day, Rubin tweeted, "Imagine obsessing over polls in the 1933 German election without covering Mein Kampf. That is what is going on now."

Rubin isn't the only one who has accused the mainstream media of giving Trump a pass too often.

In an article published on September 9, the Columbia Journalism Review's Jon Allsop argues that many reporters are "sanewashing" Trump.

"Sanewashing" is a slang term that has been around about four years and refers to making extremism seem less extreme. One of the posts on Urban Dictionary defines "sanewashing" as "attempting to downplay a person or idea's radicality to make it more palatable to the general public."

"As applied to Trump," Allsop explains, "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…. If journalists are sometimes sanewashing Trump, why are they doing it?"

Allsop adds that according to critics of efforts to "sanewash" Trump — including The New Republic's Parker Molloy — "it has something to do with that old desire to project a false equivalence, or 'balance,' between the two leading candidates."

"When I wrote earlier this year," Allsop notes, "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."

Read Jon Allsop's full Columbia Journalism Review article at this link.

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