sanewashing en · NOUN
Etymology
From sane + -wash + -ing.
Meanings
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(uncountable) The practice of restating someone’s rhetoric to render it more palatable or acceptable.
This “sanewashing” of Trump’s statements isn’t just poor journalism; it’s a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy. By continually reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse, major news outlets are failing in their duty to inform the public and are instead providing cover for increasingly erratic behavior from a former—and potentially future—president.
2024 September 4, Parker Molloy, “How the Media Sanitizes Trump’s Insanity”, in The New Republic, retrieved 07 Sep 2024:
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(uncountable) The attempt to downplay the radicality of a person or idea to render it more palatable to the general public.
There’s a hot new term doing the rounds among media critics: “sanewashing.” The term itself actually isn’t new, and it wasn’t born in media-criticism circles, per se; according to Urban Dictionary, it was coined in 2020 on a Reddit page for neoliberals..and meant “attempting to downplay a person or idea’s radicality to make it more palatable to the general public.”
2024 September 4, Jon Allsop, “Is the press ‘sanewashing’ Trump?”, in Columbia Journalism Review, retrieved 2024-09-00: