New York Times Apologizes For Sanewashing Trump By Sanewashing Trump Some More
To be fair, NYT didn't actually say the words 'I am sorry for being bad at journalism.'
The hottest slang for tweens these days is “sanewashing.” Out are “skibidi” and “sus,” in is “sanewashing.” It’s not a totally brand new term, but people are using it now to describe the mainstream media’s bizarre proclivity for, well, sane-washing Donald Trump’s rambling, bumbling, babbling batshit quotes to try to force them to make sense, in order to satisfy the mainstream media’s bizarre need to report all things as binary issues with equal, opposite sides.
It appears to have blown back into the discourse recently after Aaron Rupar said it and Parker Molloy wrote a column about it, and we guess the timing and the mood were just right. It’s taken off like wildfire — in a way that, to our eyes, is paying dividends and having a positive effect on the media’s normally egregiously shitty election coverage.
Jon Allsop gives a nice summary of how the word is being used at the Columbia Journalism Review:
As applied to Trump, the idea is that major mainstream news outlets are routinely taking his incoherent, highly abnormal rants—be they on social media or at in-person events—and selectively quoting from them to emphasize lines that, in isolation, might sound coherent or normal, thus giving a misleading impression of the whole for people who didn’t read or watch the entire thing. In her column, Molloy called out CNN for sanitizing a Trump screed about tomorrow’s presidential debate and the New York Times for omitting an allusion to a conspiracy theory about vaccines and autism from its summary of a Trump pledge to tap Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to help make health policy; since then, she and others have applied the same analysis to coverage of Trump’s incoherent remarks—particularly around the costs of childcare and a proposed Elon Musk–led “efficiency commission”—at an economic forum in New York. “This ‘sanewashing’ of Trump’s statements isn’t just poor journalism,” Molloy wrote. “It’s a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy.”
There have been a lot of articles calling this out in the past couple weeks. So many that last night, the New York Times, the capital of lazy, shitty, both-sides, phoning-it-in, sanewashing journalism about Trump, felt compelled to weigh in on the phenomenon.
And in that very article, it sanewashed Trump.
If you’d like, you can just watch Lawrence O’Donnell scream at the Times for 14 minutes last night, because it was as satisfying as it sounds.
As Lawrence explained, the Peter Baker article in question — headline: As Debate Looms, Trump Is Now the One Facing Questions About Age and Capacity — was the Times’s very good try at writing an article that suggested that perhaps Donald Trump has been an old, incoherent lunatic this entire time. It’s certainly not as fun as writing about Joe Biden being old, but that bastard dropped out of the race and stole all the Times’s joy, and also far more people than usual are calling the Times a bunch of talentless hacks.
So, a Trump age/dementia story it is!
The subheadline explained that now that Biden is gone, Trump would be the oldest president ever (maybe the oldest person ever!) and that “his rambling, sometimes incoherent public statements have stirred concern among voters.” That’s one way to say it.
The first paragraph of the Trump age/dementia story was of course about Joe Biden:
The last time the nation held a debate with the presidency on the line, a candidate with about eight decades of life behind him faced the challenge of proving that he was still up to the job of running the country. He failed.
The third graf is about how Trump has more energy than Biden, but he is also very old and incoherent and bugfuck. But overall, it’s a serviceable piece that tries to explain in 1,500 words or less that Trump is prone to extended fugue state diatribes about getting electocuted and eaten by sharks and how much he hates windmills and how he aced a dementia test one time in 2018 (allegedly) and school nurses are doing top surgery and sexual assault doesn’t count if you’re on top of clouds and besides, “I know you’re going to think it’s a terrible thing to say, but it couldn’t have happened. It didn’t happen. And, she would not have been the chosen one. She would not have been the chosen one.”
LIKE FOR INSTANCE IN THESE STORIES!
It’s not some great piece of journalism. It’s fine. But toward the end, this is the part that really chapped Lawrence O’Donnell’s ass. Baker wrote this:
Mr. Trump’s response to the child care question in New York on Thursday underscored the concerns. Often his mangled statements are summarized in news accounts in ways that do not give the full picture of how baffling they can be. Quoting them at length, though, can provide additional context. Here is a more extended account of his reply on affordable child care:
“It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about that — because the child care is, child care, it’s, couldn’t, you know, there’s something, 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’m talking about, by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly — and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care.”
Baker is talking about a truly insane answer Trump recently gave to a bunch of stony-faced, silent grownup people at the Economic Club of New York. That appeared to be his nod to the fact that everybody is talking about “sanewashing” and staring at the New York Times and yelling WHY DO YOU FUCKING SUCK SO MUCH?
THIS ONE! TRUMP WAS IN IT TOO.
And Baker did provide a longer quote than they usually do, as you see.
But it still cut off the majority of the bugfuck answer! Here, let us click the Wonkette post above and copy and paste it! Are you ready? It’s a bumblefuck!
“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down — you know, I was, uh, somebody, we had Sen. Marco Rubio [(R-Fla.)] and my daughter, Ivanka, was so, uh, impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue.”
“But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t — you know, it’s something, 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’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to but they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.”
“Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s gonna take care. We’re gonna have — I, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time. Coupled with, uh, the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country — because I have to say with child care, I want to stay with childcare, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth.”
“But growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, uh, that I just told you about. We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as childcare is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.”
“We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re gonna take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about: Make America great again. We have to do it, because right now we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question.”
See how he left off the really stupid rambling parts and only included a little tiny stupid rambling part? And then Baker typed (and this was the part that set policy-wonk Lawrence O’Donnell off):
What he seemed to be saying was that he would raise so much money by imposing tariffs on imported goods that the country could use the proceeds to pay for child care. In itself, that would be a disputable policy assumption.
As we said, if you’d like to see Lawrence rant for a good 14 minutes, the video is above.
What made him so furious was that Baker wrote that last graf — that it would be a “disputable policy assumption” that Trump could raise all kinds of money from tariffs to pay for childcare — while ignoring completely that what Trump said in his answer to the idiots at the Economic Club was “taxing foreign nations.” Is that what tariffs do? No, according to literally everyone all the way back to your middle school social studies teacher. Tariffs raise costs on American consumers.
But apparently nobody in the New York Times campaign coverage newsroom knows that. And it matters, because this is a lie Donald Trump has long been telling, one he’s particularly obsessed with right now. He’s out there calling himself a tariffs man, saying he’s going to be a tariffs president, and in an article that’s ostensibly about voters’ concerns over Trump’s age, incoherence, babbling, and lying, they didn’t bother to note that the one central conclusion of their sanewashing of Trump’s quote about (theoretically) childcare was based on Trump’s longstanding lie that tariffs are taxes on foreign countries.
(Can America tax foreign countries? Is that a thing? Lawrence O’Donnell was just asking innocently last night.)
It wasn’t just the New York Times, they’re just often the worst offenders. The Associated Press is still blaring this trash:
Tonight, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris meet in Philadelphia for what might be their only debate. Several commentators have noted, though, that she’s not only going to be debating Trump and his bullshit. She’s also going to be debating a media that is fundamentally incapable of calling Trump what he is, instead praising Trump for his “policy proposals” every time he pulls a turd out of his pants and plays with it.
Garbage, they are all useless idiot garbage.
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>>>"the New York Times, the capital of lazy, shitty, both-sides, phoning-it-in, sanewashing journalism"
It's not lazy.
Merely lazy journalism would simply be to blockquote one of Trump's lagoons of word vomit and let everyone see it for what it very evidently is.
Trump's blathering is so blatantly incoherent that they have to work to normalize it. The question everyone should be asking is why they would go to this trouble.
“[S]ometimes incoherent[]”? What the fuck. WHEN IS HE **EVER** COHERENT?