News outlets are "continually reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse," says Parker Molloy in The New Republic today, Sept 4, 2024. Example:
" While speaking at an event put on by the extremist group Moms for Liberty, Trump spread a baseless conspiracy theory that “your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation,” referring to transition-related surgeries for trans people. In their write-up of the event, a glowing piece about how Trump “charmed” this group of “conservative moms,” the Times didn’t even mention the moment where he blathered on and on about a crazy conspiracy that has and will never happen."
[Hey, here's CNN for more on that.]
Also, Molloy points out, Shawn McCreesh writing recently for the Times "liken[ed] Trump to literary giants James Joyce and William Faulkner, and even psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud" even though he acknowledged "it is difficult to find the hermeneutic methods with which to parse the linguistic flights that take him from electrocuted sharks to Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism, windmills and Rosie O’Donnell." Molloy says: "This analysis goes beyond mere sanitization; it ventures into the realm of the absurd," as it's "framing Trump’s incoherent ramblings as some form of avant-garde oratory."
Trump finally explained the Hannibal Lecter bit, and it's worse than you think.
— Comfortably Numb (@numb.comfortab.ly) Sep 7, 2024 at 5:10 PM
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Margaret Sullivan, September 7, 2024:
"According to the dictionary — well, the Urban Dictionary, at least — the term '“sanewashing” has been around since 2020. But I only encountered it in the past couple of weeks as a few smart commentators have started using it to describe the way journalists translate the rambling and nonsensical “word salad” that Donald Trump cooks up and turn it into something coherent.
Giving credit where due, Parker Molloy, Michael Tomasky, Aaron Rupar and Greg Sargent have all written about this perceptively."
Sullivan continues: "But why does the media sanewash Trump? It’s all a part of the false-equivalence I’ve been writing about here in which candidates are equalized as an ongoing gesture of performative fairness."
One of the two political parties in this country has gone entirely and completely off the rails, embodied by the nominee that they prop up and treat like a monarch. Our media apparatus is incapable of accepting this, so they “balance” coverage by creating coherence and competence where none exists.
— Kaitlin Has Had Enough (@gothamgirlblue.com) October 24, 2024 at 9:35 AM
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