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Sanewashing? The Banality Of Crazy? A 10 Years Into The Trump Era, Media Hasn’t Figured Him Out
NEW YORK — Nearly a decade into the Trump Era of politics, with less than a month until his third election day as the Republican presidential nominee, there is still shockingly little agreement among the media about how to cover Trump.
Are journalists “sanewashing” Trump, or are they falling to the “banality of crazy?” Should his rallies be televised as whole or not at all? To fact-check or not?
“If it wasn’t so serious, I would just be fascinated by everything,” said Parker Molloy, a media critic and the author of Substack’s The Present Age column. “If it didn’t have to do with who is going to be president, I would watch this and marvel at how difficult it is to cover one person who seems to challenge all of the rules of journalism.”
Long after Trump is gone, there will be books and studies written on him and the press. He has always been press-conscious and press-savvy, even as a celebrity builder in Manhattan who paid close attention to what tabloid gossip columns said about him. Most problems originate from Trump’s disregard for restrictions, his propensity to say outlandish and demonstrably false things, and his supporters’ tendency to believe him rather than those who report on him.
It’s even come full circle, with some experts now believing that the best approach to cover Trump is to give people more opportunities to hear what he says – the polar opposite of what was once popular opinion.
Molloy used the term “sanewashing” this fall to describe journalists’ tendency to launder some of Trump’s wilder or barely intelligible utterances to make them appear like the sensible pronouncements of a conventional politician. She cites CNN as an example, which distilled a Trump post on Truth Social about the “radical left” and “fake news” into a straight news story about the former president agreeing to face his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Sanewashing? The Banality Of Crazy? A Decade Into The Trump Era, Media Hasn’t Figured Him Out
At its finest, refining Trump generates a new narrative, she said. At its worst, it is misinformation.
Trump warned of the dangers posed by illegal immigrants during a rally in Wisconsin on the last weekend of September. “They will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat,” they’ll say. Michael Tomasky of The New Republic was astonished to see the phrase missing from The New York Times and Washington Post coverage, despite the fact that The Times underlined Trump’s vilification of undocumented immigrants and other media allusions to what Trump himself described as a dark speech.
“Trump constantly saying extreme, racist violent stuff can’t always be new,” Tomasky observed. “But it’s always reality. Is the press justified in disregarding reality just because it is not new?”
One potential reason the remark received little attention was because Trump, at the same rally, referred to Harris as “mentally disabled” without providing any evidence.
That remark was quickly mentioned on the ABC and CBS evening newscasts the next day, following criticism from two other Republicans and coverage of Hurricane Helene’s devastation and war in the Middle East. NBC’s “Nightly News” did not mention it at all.
In other words, Trump said something outlandish. What is new? More than sandwashing, political analyst Brian Klaas refers to it as the banality of insanity, in which journalists become accustomed to things Trump says that would be surprising from other candidates simply because they are desensitized to them.
Illuminating reporting about Trump rarely follows the trend of fast news reports that summarize daily occurrences. “This really serves the small group of news consumers that we would call news junkies, who follow the campaign day to day,” said Kelly McBride, senior vice president of the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank. “But it doesn’t help people decide how to vote, or understand the candidate better.”
Trump critics frequently complain about how the country’s major news outlets cover him. However, they sometimes disregard attempts to provide perspective on matters that affect them. In an article published Sunday, The Times, for example, employed a computer to compare Trump’s recent speeches to those from the past, and on September 9, the paper investigated doubts regarding Trump’s age and mental capacity. The Post has written about how Trump fails to mention his father’s Alzheimer’s disease while attacking others’ mental capacity and making false claims about a cognitive test he underwent. The Associated Press noted of Trump’s Wisconsin event that he “shifted from topic to topic so quickly that it was hard to keep track of what he meant at times.”
“Trump is a really difficult figure to cover because he challenges news media processes every day, and has for years,” The Times’s Maggie Haberman, one of Trump’s best-known chroniclers, told NPR last month. “The mechanisms… were not designed to deal with someone who frequently says things that are false or speaks incoherently. I believe the media has done a wonderful job of portraying who he is, what he says, and what he does.
Sanewashing? The Banality Of Crazy? A Decade Into The Trump Era, Media Hasn’t Figured Him Out
Instead, press critics may be frustrated because the work lacks the desired impact. “The people who don’t like or are infuriated by him cannot believe his success and would like the press to somehow persuade those who do like him that they are wrong,” said Tom Rosenstiel, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland. “And the press can’t do that.”
Fact-checking is a point of debate.
One of the key topics surrounding the three general election debates was how, or whether, television networks would fact-check the candidates live on air.
CNN did not cover Trump’s debate with President Joe Biden last spring. When ABC’s moderators corrected Trump four times during his September debate with Harris, the former president’s supporters were outraged. During the vice presidential debate, CBS News attempted to strike a balance and discovered how difficult it is to please everyone.
“F you CBS — how DARE YOU,” Megyn Kelly wrote on X after CBS briefly removed JD Vance’s microphone after correcting him on a comment concerning immigrants. Melanie McFarland, a media critic at Salon, argued that those who are best suited to pointing out reality “barely rose to that duty.”
The fact-checking sector flourished under Trump’s presidency, with the number of such websites increasing from 63 in 2016 to 79 in 2020, according to the Duke Reporters’ Lab. However, limits were also revealed: Republicans have stigmatized the process to the point where many Trump supporters either don’t believe individuals who attempt to determine what is real or incorrect, or don’t bother reading. Rosenstiel believes that simply pointing out when a politician is wrong is insufficient for daily reporting. They must clearly explain why.
Sanewashing? The Banality Of Crazy? A Decade Into The Trump Era, Media Hasn’t Figured Him Out
In the heady days of 2015, television news networks such as CNN aired extended coverage of Trump campaign rallies. It was entertaining. It boosted ratings. What harm could be caused?
Many eventually regretted their decision. Throughout his administration and beyond, non-Trump-friendly media sources have battled with the question of how much to show Trump unfiltered, and have yet to reach a definitive conclusion. CNN occasionally shows Trump at rallies, but rarely for extended periods of time.
However, in a step back to the future, some experts now believe it is best to let people hear what Trump has to say. Poynter’s McBride applauded The 19th for a child care report in which, unsatisfied by an attempt to clarify Trump’s beliefs with his campaign, the website merely printed a perplexing 365-word verbatim quotation from Trump when questioned about the matter.
While truth checks and context are important, there is value in presenting Trump as is. “Showing Trump at length is not sanewashing,” Rosenstiel added.
Molloy acknowledged to being surprised by the response to her original column on sanewashing. It could represent a desire to define the undefinable, to figure out what the news industry hasn’t been able to do after so long. She mentions politicians that attempt to emulate Trump but fail.
“They don’t have what makes him Donald Trump,” she went on: “People can see it as a sign of his intelligence, or as evidence of his insane behavior. It’s probably a combination of the two.”
SOURCE | AP
