News organisations in America have been accused of “sane-washing” Donald Trump’s outrageous behaviour on the campaign trail and failing to highlight his wavering mental faculties.

His radical statements and bizarre behaviour has escalated in recent weeks, as he mused about using the military against United States citizens, lied about legal immigrants eating people’s pets, talked about a sports star’s penis, and spent more than 30 minutes nodding on stage to music.

News media, however, has been accused of ‘sane-washing’ Trump by downplaying his statements, adding false context and ignoring the most egregious examples of his mental decline.

Dr Glynn Greensmith, a journalism lecturer at Curtin University, said major news organisations will use every word in the thesaurus except lie when describing what Donald Trump says.

“If Donald Trump is saying ‘I’m going to shoot you all in the head’ when I am elected, then the headlines are Trump applies strongman language to appeal to his base,” Greensmith said.

“Joe Biden faced accountability about his age, which I believe was quite justified, but based on what Trump does and says, he does not appear to be very well and it is not reported in the same way.”

A Redditor coined the term in a forum for neo-liberals (a political philosophy associated with free-market capitalism).

Then Aaron Rupar introduced it via X into the journalese lexicon in the context of Trump.

Sane-washing

Trump has tried to diminish democracy in America by refusing a peaceful transfer of power, incited a mob on lawmakers and became a convicted felon without news media organisations learning how to effectively report on him, Greensmith believes.

“During his first presidency, the CEO said that he may not be good for America, but he’s damn good for CBS,” he said.

“There is absolutely a bias, explicit and implicit, in favour of Donald Trump because of this.”

Trump had long enjoyed a special privileged place in American news media, often as a commentator and the subject of stories from well before his time in politics, he said.

Dr Natasha van Antwerpen, a psychology lecturer studying constructive journalism and misinformation at The University of Adelaide, said objectivity is a contentious debate within the confines of the journalism industry.

“There are always influences that will shape how you perceive or portray an issue,” she said.

“If you are saying that you’re being objective, you’ve still made some sort of selection about what information is being included.”

Van Antwerpen said the reporting that receives the most traction for a news organisation is not necessarily the best practice in terms of public interest.

“From a psychological perspective, there’s a real challenge there as well in terms of the psychological responses that people have,” she said.

“The illusory truth effect essentially means that if you see a piece of information multiple times, you start to believe it to be true and it even works on outlandish facts, making them appear more true than before.”

The pied piper

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, according to emails published by WikiLeaks, also “deliberately elevated” Trump’s campaign as part of a “pied piper” strategy, resulting in an estimate of billions in free advertising.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign encouraged attention on Trump’s longshot campaign in 2016 to deprive others of the media spotlight. Photo: Getty

Prominent pollster Nate Silver even suggested that Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, had ‘sane-washed’ his Republican rival JD Vance during their debate.

“The term ‘sane-washing’ is going around among liberal media critics, the idea that the media is too willing to normalise Trump and Vance’s behaviour,” Silver wrote in a Substack post.

“He said nothing about the Republican ticket’s conspiratorial claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets, for instance.”

Some of the news organisations that have been accused of ‘sane-washing’ Trump have done stories on the ‘sane-washing’ phenomenon.

One could argue journalists are ultimately ‘sane-washing’ their workplace’s ‘sane-washing’ of Trump by pointing the finger at competitors, rather than looking inward at their own deficiencies in reporting, editorialising and coverage.