sanewash
English
[edit]
Etymology
[edit]Pronunciation
[edit]Verb
[edit]sanewash (third-person singular simple present sanewashes, present participle sanewashing, simple past and past participle sanewashed)
- (transitive, intransitive) To restate one’s perspective to seem more palatable or acceptable.
- 2021 September 22, Jonathan Chait, “What Jonathan Franzen and the Left Get Wrong About Free Speech”, in Intelligencer[1], retrieved 2024-09-07:
- You can try to sanewash these claims as merely urging researchers to examine their own biases and try to include the perspectives of people outside the research community. But that would require a willful misreading of a document that all but declares research has to affirm a left-wing perspective.
- 2024, Fredrik deBoer, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, page 53:
- It also represents a good example of "sanewashing,” an internet term that refers to the process through which radical ideas are gradually watered down to be more appealing to the wider public.
- (transitive) To present someone's apparently crazy rantings as sensible discourse by editing out the bizarre portions or summarizing them with a more coherent interpretation.
- Coordinate term: steelman (verb)
- 2024 September 4, Parker Molloy, “How the Media Sanitizes Trump’s Insanity”, in The New Republic:
- This “sanewashing” of Trump’s statements isn’t just poor journalism; it’s a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy.
- 2024 September 9, Matthew Chapman, “Raw Story”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name):
- President Donald Trump's rhetoric and ideas are being "sanewashed" by the mainstream media as they pull selective quotes from his speeches and mask otherwise obvious extremism, argued Jon Allsop for the Columbia Journalism Review.
- 2024 September 12, Paul Krugman, “Here’s Why Trump Was Forced to Say He Has Only ‘Concepts of a Plan’”, in The New York times:
- He essentially sounded the same as he does at his rallies — except that this time TV viewers experienced his ranting raw, not sanewashed by summaries that make him sound more coherent than he is.
- 2024 October 2, Tara Suter, “Nate Silver suggests Walz was ‘sanewashing’ Vance”, in The Hill:
- Pollster Nate Silver suggested Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) was “sanewashing” his Republican rival, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), in Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate.