Are Journalists Engaging in ‘Sanewashing’ When Reporting Trump?
Photo Courtesey: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons
How can ‘Trump the populist’ present himself as the people’s president with so little to his credit? He lacks the military accolades of Caesar, magnanimity of F.D.R or youthfulness of Kennedy. The crux of this is found in the dreaded, so-called ‘mainstream media’, that we hear so much about. Centre-left media has been accused of ‘sanewashing’ Trump; they arguably present his claims as more credible than they really are, or at least cherry-pick the most coherent content within them. Take a look at MSNBC’s coverage of Kashyap ‘Kash’ Patel’s appointment as Trump’s FBI director.
The article paints a normative picture of this appointment, deriding Mr. Patel as a ‘MAGA Loyalist’, and accusing him of ‘parrot[ing] Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen”’. It portrays him as someone who merely repeats Trump’s ‘threats against the intelligence community’. MSNBC cannot claim to be impartial: it does just enough to irritate Trump’s voter base, but crucially and unwittingly, it adopts Trump’s own language in presenting Patel as an underdog. It mentions that even though Patel had a ‘remarkable rise under the first Trump administration’, he would still ‘face an uphill battle for senate confirmation’ and ‘a rocky road to confirmation as FBI director’. Suddenly, Mr. Patel sounds like he is a hero on a quest, rather than a demagogue on a comfortable paycheck. This cannot be intentional and so it has to be chalked up to poor choice of language or an elaborate coping mechanism:‘sanewashing’ style.
Poor left-wing coverage that galvanizes reactionary Trump voters is far from unique to MSNBC. Another prescient example of misbegotten reportage may be the Washington Post’s coverage of the Second Presidential Debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
A retrospective on the debate, written on the 21st October, lambasted Trump’s remark that Kamala Harris was a ‘a stupid person, stupid person’ as potentially sexist, racist, or both. Even if Trump’s claim was neither sexist, nor racist, it was clearly untrue: ‘stupid’ attorneys who climb to the second highest rank in American politics are hard to come by. Now the emphasis on Trump’s rambling rhetoric has been usurped by dubious claims about its intention, much to the delight of the right-wing who could now present it as progressive irrationality or zealousness. Trump is ‘sanewashed’ by the media who distract from his baseless comments with baseless articles of their own.
Whether the right-wing is guilty of ‘sanewashing’ Trump is an uninteresting question. The right-wing press has a vested interest in normalising Trump as much as possible. This can hardly be considered a journalistic fumble. By contrast, in left-wing media, there is a strong sense of Trump fatigue. The critical wall-to-wall coverage of Trump across 24-hour news cycles throughout his first term failed to prevent a second term. Turning the volume down on Trump discourse is an overall good: the president-elect’s popularity relies on his ability to ‘destroy the libs on X’, or at least rattle their cages. However, a moderation of rhetoric does not necessitate a moderation of opinion. Both the MSNBC and the Washington Post articles miss the mark here: patronising rhetoric seeps through into uninspired pieces that have nothing new to say about Trump.
Donald Trump, despite his ability to win over the hearts and minds of the American people, is no master rhetorician. He is no Cicero, Lincoln or Reagan for that matter. Left-wing sanitized, and right-wing sensationalized, publications both sanewash and hystericize Trump in equal measure. In doing so, they oversimplify Trump and normalize populism on a global stage.