Sanewashing Revisited

While reading Andrew Gelman's recent post on sanewashing, I was surprised at how many people in the comment section seem to be completely unfamiliar with the term. Best lesson here is that I shouldn't assume that most normal people obsessively follow press critics like Margaret Sullivan.With that in mind, here is my working definition, supported by a beautiful example from, of course, the New York Times.Sanewashing is the practice of journalists downplaying signs of instability, mental decline, and general craziness through often comically understated language, extensive and misrepresentative paraphrasing that overstates the coherence and softens the rhetoric of the original statements, burying especially embarrassing details, or simply choosing not to cover certain stories.Sanewashing is closely associated with normalization, coverage that desensitizes readers to how extreme and bizarre these times are.Sanewashing is applied to various groups (Silicon Valley lunacy has been…