President Donald Trump's rhetoric and ideas are being "sanewashed" by the mainstream media as they pull selective quotes from his speeches and mask otherwise obvious extremism, argued Jon Allsop for the Columbia Journalism Review.
"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," wrote Allsop.
Examples would include how some outlets paraphrased Trump's bizarre rant about child care and tariffs into something that, on the surface, sounded far more coherent than it was.
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These complaints about coverage of Trump are nothing new, noted Allsop — in fact, they have gone on for years. And moreover there are some reasonable defenses of the media's actions, including a reluctance to diagnose mental illness from the newsroom and a genuine need to inform voters what Trump's policymaking could look like, even if that means dressing it up more intelligently than he phrases things.
However, he wrote, "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."
The real harm being done here, Allsop continued, is "not journalists’ failure to resolve an unresolvable debate about exposure, but their failure to accurately describe Trump’s rhetoric ... and to do so with due prominence." For example, Allsop previously criticized the press for taking seriously Republicans' defenses of Trump's claim at a rally that his defeat would mean a "bloodbath in the country," that he really just meant the auto industry would collapse.
Not only is this not what he said, Allsop wrote, but he also said a number of other violent or conspiratorial things in that same rally that didn't get any attention because the press let a debate over what "bloodbath" means suck up all the oxygen.
"Tomorrow night, viewers will get an unadulterated dose of Trump when they tune in for his debate against Harris on ABC," Allsop concluded. "Unavoidably, it’ll be all our jobs to describe what Trump said with the mics on."
