Columbia Journalism Review columnist Jon Allsop extends a recent conversation here, asking “Is the press ‘sanewashing’ Trump?” His answer resonates with me. After several paragraphs recapping the debate thus far, he weighs in:
As I see it, newsroom policies discouraging remote diagnoses of mental health are generally to be followed, even if they shouldn’t curb any and all discussion in this area; also, Trump does have (or at least is associated with) policies that merit scrutiny, however incoherently he articulates them, and—as even some critics acknowledge—there has been at least some sharp recent coverage centering the incoherence. The idea that “the media” as a whole has ignored Trump’s fitness for office is very hard to sustain.
I interrupt him mid-paragraph for emphasis. This is a point I’ve been making for going on nine years now: whatever the failings of the mainstream press in failing to adjust longstanding journalistic norms to deal with a decidedly abnormal candidate/President, it has been abundantly clear since well before Trump secured the 2016 Republican nomination that he was spouting racist, misogynistic, nonsensical rhetoric. While I do think his verbal performance has noticeably declined over the intervening period, this has been very clear to me despite hardly watching any of his speeches.
Nonetheless, 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. And, if the press hasn’t ignored Trump’s fitness, [TNR’s Greg] Sargent made a compelling case, in his column, that it hasn’t subjected his age and condition to anything like the level of focused scrutiny that was applied to President Biden on such grounds. (Sargent deftly illustrated this by swapping Trump’s name into real headlines about Biden.) As I wrote after Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June, Trump was incoherent that night, too, but seemed to get away with it because he showed more energy.
That debate was one of the rare campaign event I watched in real time and, frankly, I think the press got it right. Yes, Trump spouted a Gish Gallop of nonsense all night. But, rather obviously, Biden’s WTF performance was the story of the evening. It wasn’t just the FTFNYT that made that judgment: Nancy Pelosi and pretty much the entirety of the Democratic Party Establishment read the tea leaves and pushed Biden to the side.
If journalists are sometimes sanewashing Trump, why are they doing it? Critics including [Parker] Molloy and [Mike] Barnicle have suggested that it has something to do with that old desire to project a false equivalence, or “balance,” between the two leading candidates. [Jeffrey] Goldberg blamed a “bias toward coherence,” whereby Trump benefits from journalists’ classic conception of their role as being to make sense of the world around them. (“It works like this: Trump sounds nuts, but he can’t be nuts, because he’s the presumptive nominee for president of a major party,” Goldberg wrote.) There are other possible explanations. Could it be that elite journalists think so little of Trump that they effectively condescend to him by cleaning up his speech? Do they think that picking meaning out of his word salads makes them sound clever or original? Is he held to a lower standard than his opponents because the latter are expected to speak in full sentences and he never has been? Is Trump sounding incoherent simply old news at this point, in an industry that prizes novelty?
As regular readers are aware, I’m strongly in favor of the last of these explanations. Trump being Trump isn’t news. Additionally, it’s longstanding journalistic practice to try to explain things to readers rather than make them wade through the speeches for themselves to figure it out. If the reporters understand what Trump is trying to say, they’re naturally going to translate it into coherent English for the reader. (They’ve long done the same for Biden, by the way.)
Whichever it is—and all these explanations could, theoretically, be in play at the same time—it’s worth noting that the sanewashing phenomenon figures into a debate that is almost as old as Trump’s political career itself, and legitimately thorny: whether to expose news consumers more to his rhetoric, or shut it out. Proponents of the former approach have argued that broadcasting Trump’s rallies live, for example, offers an unvarnished window onto his incoherence; proponents of the latter have argued that the first approach exposes audiences to unchecked lies and gives Trump free airtime. I wrote about this debate earlier in the year and concluded that it has been so circular because there isn’t really a satisfying answer—it felt true to me that many people have become desensitized to how Trump talks, but also that journalists cannot expect people to consume streams of raw information all the time.
There really is no right answer here. Again, though, my longstanding view on this is that reporters should treat Trump like they would any other major party nominee/President. Like it or not, his speeches and rallies were newsworthy precisely because they were so out of the ordinary. But, after awhile, their weirdness became background noise, barely rating a mention.
The biggest problem, I concluded, was not journalists’ failure to resolve an unresolvable debate about exposure, but their failure to accurately describe Trump’s rhetoric—without resorting to euphemism, for example—and to do so with due prominence. The sanewashing critique speaks to this same problem, at least in part. When I wrote earlier this year, 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. This problem is still with us, and it still involves blood. Over the weekend, Trump said (again at a rally) that removing immigrant gangs from the US would be a “bloody story”—remarks that got media coverage, but not as much as they merited given their implications. Ditto an explicit Trump pledge to prosecute those he believes “cheated” in the coming election. (Last night, an Axios newsletter mentioned this threat in its last lines, having opened with “dueling tax-cut promises” by Harris and Trump that amount to “each candidate trying to make Election Day feel like Christmas morning.”) If sanewashing the incoherent things Trump says is a problem, then so is failing to proportionately cover his all-too-coherent threats.
Here, though, I’m fully in agreement with Allsop that the press coverage has been inadequate. Trump’s authoritarian—and increasingly violent—rhetoric should not be normalized. It might be baked in at this point, in that anyone who still supports Trump now has managed to rationalize it, but it’s so out of the ordinary—and dangerous—that it merits vigilant coverage. Not-so-cryptic threats of bloodbaths should make headlines each and every time they’re made.
To whatever extent journalists show people Trump’s unadulterated speech, it will always be part of our job to describe it. At root, the critics of sanewashing are really just asking the media to “report accurately on what we’re all seeing in front of us,” as Fattal put it in The Atlantic. Sections of the media, not least those from which the critics hail, are doing this already; if major outlets aren’t always doing likewise, the fact that they do it sometimes shows that accurate descriptions of violent and incoherent rhetoric are communicable within the existing linguistic and reportorial codes of elite media. (The Atlantic is a highly elite publication, and seems to have little problem clearly describing the things Trump says.)
But The Atlantic isn’t a news magazine. It’s entire remit is analysis, opinion, and feature writing. It’s just a different animal than the NYT, WaPo, or CNN.
Tomorrow night, viewers will get an unadulterated dose of Trump when they tune in for his debate against Harris on ABC. Well, somewhat adulterated; Harris will be there too, of course, and Trump’s mic will be muted when she is talking—to the frustration of Harris’s team, which wanted her to be able to grill Trump in real time and also reportedly saw benefit in letting viewers hear Trump acting out. Ironically, it was Biden—who agreed to the terms for the debate before dropping out—who demanded muted mics; even Trump’s opponents, it seems, can’t agree on whether it’s best to shut him up or let him be heard. Unlike at the Biden-Trump debate in June, a “pool” of journalists will reportedly be close enough to the stage to hear the candidates this time. It might end up being their job to tell us what Trump said off-mic. Unavoidably, it’ll be all our jobs to describe what Trump said with the mics on.
Given that Harris is unlikely to be incoherently rambling and staring off into space during the telecast, it’s quite likely that the story will be one of contrasts. Whether that will be comparative zingers, Trump’s behavior, or what remains to be seen. I will tune in to watch it for myself.
