The Media Has Made Donald Trump Look More Coherent Than He Is. It’s Called ‘Sanewashing’

Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription, on Patreon, or on Stripe. Help us produce all of the high-quality, original content we publish week after week despite the challenges of content-scraping AI, antisocial media, inflation, and other hurdles.

On September 5, 2024, after giving a speech about his economic plans for the United States, Donald Trump was asked what he would do, if re-elected president, to make childcare more affordable.

Trump then offered a nonsensical, 374-word response:

well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down — you know, I was somebody — we had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter, Ivanka, was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about — because, look, childcare is childcare. It’s something — you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to — but they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country […]

Trump’s answer (or lack thereof) showed he had almost certainly not given the important topic any serious prior thought. His response also provided valuable insights into the scattered state of his own mind.

Yet, many of the subsequent news stories didn’t pay any attention to this massive fumble, and instead reported earnestly on the policy ideas put forward in the scripted parts of his speech.

The New York Times’ article about the event, for example, was headlined “Trump calls for an efficiency commission, an idea pushed by Elon Musk.”

It made reference to his “jumbled and meandering answer” only once, and not until the 24th paragraph.

For many frustrated observers, this was a prime example of what had come to be known as “sanewashing.”

However, online news outlets tended to use more strident language when doing so (using words such as “weird” and “bizarre”), where traditional outlets typically opted for more neutral language (like “meandering” and “erratic”).

This would suggest that journalists working for outlets such as the New York Times may feel a stronger need to adhere to notions of impartiality, and thus may feel less able to call out the extraordinary aspects of Trump’s rhetoric.

Is this a problem?

A lingering question amid all of this is whether or not sanewashing is fundamentally problematic in the first place.

Obviously it’s important that journalists accurately reflect reality in their reporting.

But we also don’t want them to engage in stenography either, and just reprint everything a politician says word-for-word.

In practice, sanewashing may simply be an inevitable byproduct of journalism itself; of the natural process of filtering out information that is deemed less relevant, and focusing instead on what’s most important.

And, very often, journalists get those calls right.

To demonstrate this point, let’s return to the article we mentioned earlier: “Trump calls for an efficiency commission, an idea pushed by Elon Musk.”

The commission referenced in that headline was the agency that would later come to be known as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and which would be responsible for — among other things — the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

That act alone has been forecast to result in as many as 14 million excess deaths worldwide, which is obviously much more significant than a failed answer on childcare.

So journalists do need to make sure they’re still drawing attention to Trump’s weird sidetracks, but not letting those distract from the more serious ideas buried underneath.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Authors

Stephen Harrington, Associate Professor, School of Communication, Queensland University of Technology

Ella Chorazy, Senior Research Associate, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology

Timothy Graham, Associate Professor in Digital Media, Queensland University of Technology

Disclosure statement

Stephen Harrington receives funding from the Australian Research Council, for the Discovery Project ‘Understanding and Combatting “Dark Political Communication”‘.

Ella Chorazy receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC), for the Discovery Project ‘Understanding and Combatting “Dark Political Communication”‘.

Timothy Graham receives funding from the Australian Research Council for the Discovery Project “Understanding and Combatting ‘Dark Political Communication’”, from the Universities Australia-German Academic Exchange Service Joint Research Cooperation Scheme, and from Meta Platforms Technologies.