Some people like to languish in a foamy residue of self-improvement content in January. I prefer to jump straight back into the giant pool of alarm I was immersed in the year before. The bad news is that sanewashing, a term popularised in advance of the US presidential election, is already seeping through the new-year barrier into the icy embrace of 2025, ready to claim its place as the defining media trend of this decade’s miserable midpoint.
I’ve heard it referred to as the opposite of gaslighting — that sticky, literary word people use to describe being deliberately made to feel like they’re going mad. Sanewashing is what happens when wild things happen or a stream of incomprehensible weirdness spews from someone’s mouth but it’s all either intentionally made to sound reasonable or is served up in ways that help imply that it is.
In a sense, then, gaslighting and sanewashing are not opposites, but two sides of the same dangerous coin, in that someone who sees sanewashing flourish unchallenged will soon start to feel like they are being gaslit.
Collins Dictionary is monitoring it for evidence of usage based on the suggested definition “attempting to downplay a person or idea’s radicality to make it more palatable to the general public”. This meaning springs from its frequent surfacing in halcyon pre-election days to criticise how the media translated the extreme and typically garbled ramblings of Donald Trump.
For me, it doesn’t quite cover the full extent of sanewashing. It is not only radicality but mind-bending absurdity that can be rendered acceptable and logical to the public. And then there is the question of whether there is always a conscious attempt to sanewash, or whether the phenomenon is a side effect of the way the news industry operates.
Sanewashing is partly a consequence of format. Within broadcast media, especially old-school television news bulletins, time is finite. In headlines, space is limited. There is an art to being succinct. But much gets lost, no matter how spot on the framing.
By the time Trump got to the briefly notorious Madison Square Garden rally, the adjectives used to characterise his speeches — crude, angry, vitriolic, meandering, chaotic — were being given prominence over mere repeats of what he said.
And yet the full queasy experience of a long-form Trump address, with its pile-up of outrageous tangents and quasi-comedic asides, can by definition never be captured within a one-line synopsis or one-minute summary.
Similarly, it is difficult — though I have seen seasoned journalists try — to distil into a single news report every horrifying dimension of the multipronged cruelty inflicted by Israel on Gaza, the myriad ways in which it is behaving like a rogue state and the manner in which it is being aided and abetted in doing so. There is simply too much of it.
This highlights a problem nobody ever had to worry about in more benign times: that the media has a structural bias towards the rational.
News outlets also have a reputational interest, and therefore a financial stake, in presenting themselves as demystification agents. Journalists are charged with trying to explain everything, even the unknowable and nonsensical, because media brands promote themselves as a means by which people can make sense of the world — even when they, too, contribute to the confusion.
In parallel with this inherent instinct to bestow coherency upon the incoherent, well-meaning news outlets do two other things. They succumb to bothsidesism, or the false balance that results from the wrongful application of impartiality to two things that are not equivalent. And they tastefully refrain — sometimes, anyway — from using labels like crazy, bonkers, bats**t, unhinged, deranged and other terms that may be laced with insensitivity, but nevertheless sum up the age we live in.
Often what people who attack the media for “normalising” the abnormal or platforming extremists are incensed by is tone. Traditional news outlets might have valid reasons to stick to conventional, restrained formality, but they will be lambasted for not explicitly calling a spade a spade. This can boil down to differences of opinion in where statements of fact end and editorialising begins.
The bind in which media organisations find themselves in was exemplified at the weekend amid Elon Musk’s obsessive commentary on UK affairs, which has ranged from calling on King Charles to dissolve parliament (very 1830s), claiming a government minister “deserves to be in prison” and doing a swift volte-face on the merits of Nigel Farage. And that’s just since Friday.
When the BBC push-notified its story on Musk calling on Farage to be replaced as leader of the Reform party, it was accused of feeding Musk’s desire for influence.
Perhaps some would have been happier if there was no push notification at all. I personally hate the things. But it seems odd to argue that such interventions from the wealthiest man in the world and an incoming official in the Trump administration should just be ignored by the media. They are too unusual and too sinister to do that.
Instead, it is the wording of the notification, not the notification itself, that deserves scrutiny. In quoting Musk’s view that Farage “doesn’t have what it takes” and failing to refer to the Tesla man’s comments as the interference they objectively are, it could have been better.
Indeed, the only possible path out of the sanewashed maze of stupidity and awfulness is to continually remember and remind others that there is nothing normal about the politics of 2025.
But if the flaw of a headline is that the “out-of-control billionaire has some nerve” bit is sometimes silent, then our expectations might have gone awry here too. Some blanks we just have to fill in for ourselves.
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