The word of the day is “sanewashing.”
Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop observes that major mainstream news outlets are routinely quoting Trump's incoherent, highly abnormal rants selectively in order to make them sound sane.
Allsop explains that the news media emphasizes “… 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? … (I)t 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.”
So America 2024 is a place and time where a gibbering reality-TV loony can actually be propped for a second run at dictatorship, thanks to the collusion of corrupt national institutions.
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