I’m highlighting two stories from the Columbia Journalism Review today. For many DK readers, the situations that these stories describe aren’t exactly news. But they deserve every bit of attention they can get given the need for long-term solutions to the multi-faceted media brokenness they explore.
From Jon Alsop at the Columbia Journalism Review on Is the press ‘sanewashing’ Trump? (That’s a headline that didn’t need to be couched as a question):
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Aaron Rupar, a journalist who is very active on X, has been credited with coining “sanewashing” in this specific context, but the term appeared to really blow up last week, after Parker Molloy wrote a column about it in The New Republic. (She expanded on the idea as a guest on the podcast Some More News.) The word has since been picked up by media bigwigs including Paul Krugman and Rachel Maddow, and appeared in outlets from Ireland to India.
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. In her column, Molloy called out CNN for sanitizing a Trump screed about tomorrow’s presidential debate and the New York Times for omitting an allusion to a conspiracy theory about vaccines and autism from its summary of a Trump pledge to tap Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to help make health policy; since then, she and others have applied the same analysis to coverage of Trump’s incoherent remarks—particularly around the costs of childcare and a proposed Elon Musk–led “efficiency commission”—at an economic forum in New York. “This ‘sanewashing’ of Trump’s statements isn’t just poor journalism,” Molloy wrote. “It’s a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy.”
If the word “sanewashing” is not new, neither is the idea that the media is masking Trump’s incoherence. As Molloy noted in her column, she wrote a similar piece—headlined “By reframing Trump’s incoherent, inaccurate ramblings as bland political copy, journalists are carrying water for the president”—in 2020, for the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America; she also quoted from a more recent article in which Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, criticized headlines about a Trump rally that focused on “extraneities” like the weather and Trump’s frustration with the teleprompter, rather than his bizarre rhetoric about sharks. [...]
And from Jake Lahut, The decline of local news has become a campaign problem:
At a post–Memorial Day event earlier this year, Elissa Slotkin, one of the nation’s top Democratic candidates for US Senate, had almost all the ingredients in place for an effective swing through northern Michigan: beautiful weather, a prime location in the middle of the biggest metro area for a hundred miles, and a packed audience.
Yet upon a closer look, the crowd—bathed in hues of blue from the sun reflecting off Lake Michigan—was missing something.
There was nobody in attendance from any of the local television affiliates or the region’s paper of record, the Traverse City Record-Eagle. Instead, the event was being covered by a single public radio affiliate from the nearby artsy town of Interlochen; a reporter for Michigan Advance, a nonprofit startup; and me, a New York–based journalist dropping in on an election with national implications.
It was a prime example of a media problem that campaigns and political-communications experts say is reshaping how they approach election season: the steep decline of local news. [...]
Jay Rosen is a distinguished press critic and early advocate for citizen journalism. In 1999, his book What Are Journalists For? was published. In an Economist review, he noted:
My own view is that journalists should describe the world in a way that helps us participate in political life. That is what they are "for". But too often they position us as savvy analysts of a scene we are encouraged to view from a certain distance, as if we were spectators to our own democracy, or clever manipulators of our fellow citizens.
