On September 5 2024, after giving a speech about his economic plans for the United States, Donald Trump was asked what he would do, if re-elected president, to make childcare more affordable.<\/p>\n
Trump then offered a nonsensical, 374-word response<\/a>:<\/p>\n well, I would do that, and we\u2019re sitting down \u2013 you know, I was somebody \u2013 we had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter, Ivanka, was so impactful on that issue. It\u2019s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I\u2019m talking about \u2013 because, look, childcare is childcare. It\u2019s something \u2013 you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I\u2019m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they\u2019re not used to \u2013 but they\u2019ll get used to it very quickly. And it\u2019s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they\u2019ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country [\u2026]<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s answer (or lack thereof) showed he had almost certainly not given the important topic any serious prior thought. His response also provided valuable insights into the scattered state of his own mind. <\/p>\n Yet, many of the subsequent news stories didn\u2019t pay any attention to this massive fumble, and instead reported earnestly on the policy ideas put forward in the scripted parts of his speech. <\/p>\n The New York Times\u2019 article about the event<\/a>, for example, was headlined \u201cTrump calls for an efficiency commission, an idea pushed by Elon Musk\u201d. <\/p>\n It made reference to his \u201cjumbled and meandering answer\u201d only once, and not until the 24th paragraph.<\/p>\n For many frustrated observers, this was a prime example of what had come to be known as \u201csanewashing\u201d.<\/p>\n What is \u2018sanewashing\u2019?<\/p>\n The term \u201csanewashing\u201d has been used to describe the tendency of journalists \u2013 particularly when reporting on Trump \u2013 to focus their attention on the coherent and normal (or \u201csane\u201d) parts of what he says, while ignoring his often weird, incoherent ramblings (about, for instance, the fictional movie character Hannibal Lecter<\/a>).<\/p>\n Many have argued<\/a> that, in doing this, journalists are giving the wider public an inaccurate picture of who Trump is. They may even be inadvertently covering up his more extreme and dangerous ideas and whether he is fit to govern.<\/p>\n The important context here, too, is that during the 2024 campaign, Joe Biden had received intense<\/a> scrutiny<\/a> over his declining physical and mental capacities, which caused the then-president to drop out of the race in August that year.<\/p>\n Many felt Trump was just as cognitively unfit<\/a> for office (if not moreso), but that was not clear to voters because journalists were sanewashing him, and making him seem more normal and \u201ctogether\u201d than he really was.<\/p>\n Some commentators even suggested<\/a> this revealed an underlying \u201cbias\u201d among journalists, which was helping Trump to win the election.<\/p>\n But our groundbreaking research tells a more complicated story. <\/p>\n Sanewashing in the 2024 election<\/p>\n We decided to investigate whether journalists really had sanewashed Trump in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election.<\/p>\n To do so, we focused our analysis around two speeches, the coverage of which had received a lot of attention for potential sanewashing.<\/p>\n One was the childcare example we mentioned earlier. The other was at a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where Trump made an off-colour remark about Arnold Palmer, which was widely interpreted as<\/a> a reference to the size of the late golfer\u2019s genitals.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n We took the text of those two speeches, as well as hundreds of news articles that referenced them in the weeks that followed (from both traditional newspaper sources, as well as less-traditional online news outlets), and ran them through a series of computational analyses.<\/p>\n Our recently-published results<\/a> show there is some evidence that sanewashing was occurring around both of these speeches.<\/p>\n We found reporters, on the whole, tended to focus on just one or two key topics Trump talked about, and did so via substantially different language than the now-president used.<\/p>\n But this didn\u2019t occur consistently.<\/p>\n Journalists covering Trump\u2019s economics speech tended to focus on exactly that: themes of taxation and government spending, and largely overlooked his failed answer on childcare.<\/p>\n On the other hand, when covering the Latrobe rally, journalists were much more inclined to discuss the comments about Palmer. <\/p>\n Perhaps not surprisingly, though, this was seen more frequently in online outlets, as compared to mainstream newspapers. <\/p>\n We also found, in spite of the media criticism, there was substantial meta-commentary on Trump\u2019s incoherent speaking style. <\/p>\n However, online news outlets tended to use more strident language when doing so (using words such as \u201cweird\u201d and \u201cbizarre\u201d), where traditional outlets typically opted for more neutral language (like \u201cmeandering\u201d and \u201cerratic\u201d). <\/p>\n This would suggest that journalists working for outlets such as the New York Times may feel a stronger need to adhere to notions of impartiality, and thus may feel less able to call out the extraordinary aspects of Trump\u2019s rhetoric.<\/p>\n Is this a problem?<\/p>\n A lingering question amid all of this is whether or not sanewashing is fundamentally problematic in the first place.<\/p>\n Obviously it\u2019s important that journalists accurately reflect reality in their reporting.<\/p>\n But we also don\u2019t want them to engage in stenography either, and just reprint everything a politician says word-for-word.<\/p>\n In practice, sanewashing may simply be an inevitable byproduct of journalism itself; of the natural process of filtering out information that is deemed less relevant, and focusing instead on what\u2019s most important. <\/p>\n And, very often, journalists get those calls right. <\/p>\n To demonstrate this point, let\u2019s return to the article we mentioned earlier<\/a>: \u201cTrump calls for an efficiency commission, an idea pushed by Elon Musk\u201d.<\/p>\n The commission referenced in that headline was the agency that would later come to be known as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and which would be responsible for \u2013 among other things \u2013 the dismantling<\/a> of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).<\/p>\n