The press has been feverishly demanding more and more wonky details about the presidential candidates’ proposals. If only they could understand them!

Sanewashing.

It’s pretty rare for the Columbia Journalism Review and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban to be dishing on the same topic. But media critics touched a nerve this week with accusations that the political press suffers from a “coherence bias,” particularly as it relates to Donald Trump: the tendency of reporters and editors to take his verbal diarrhea and transform it, through the magic of elision and omission, into statesmanship. TNR contributor Parker Molloy has an even better word for this practice: “sanewashing.”

  • Bone@lemmy.world
    32·
    2 months ago

    It’s probably another facet to bothsidesing. Instead of reducing everyone to the worse offending party’s level this is making the more insane party seem like just another choice. I’d say it’s weird but it seems like it’s not.

    • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      5·
      2 months ago

      I would say it’s very weird. No sense in normalizing a useless practice like false equivalencies. No one benefits from being unable to determine the difference between a neo-liberal politician and fascist cult leader.

  • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    311·
    2 months ago

    The useful way to report on Donald Trump is to identify him as a fascist and his mass deportation plan as ethnic cleansing.

    Reporters think it violates journalist integrity if they correctly identify the MAGA movement as a fascist movement. As if a view point from no where would be biased by the act of calling a fascist a fascist. We should not want the news to have a neutral view point on fascists. There is nothing neutral about an ideology that will kill us all. A viewpoint from no where isn’t something we should even want. Rather than being unbiased the news should be biased in favor of the people’s common interests.

    Trump’s tariffs will hurt the economy. We know this because when faced with new tariffs countries raise tariffs in response. There is historic evidence for this, the most recent is Trump’s first term. When Trump raised tariffs on China, China responded with their own tariffs and American farmers paid the price.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2019/12/27/trump-china-tariffs-farmers-subsidies/

    News that attempts to make equivalency between Kamala Harris’ and Donald Trump’s policies in the pursuit of an unbiased viewpoint is not useful to the American people because it’s not accurate. Donald Trump’s policies are bad for the economy and news reporting that explains that to the American people would be useful because it’s provably true information.

    The news media should be a mechanism on delivering measurable, falsifiable, verifiable reality to the American public. Not a balancing act of attempting to appear unbiased from a political perspective. There is no utility in a institution that can’t call out a death cult like MAGA for what it is. We are on the tipping point between incrementally improving society and death camps. Meanwhile the news media is worried they might be accused of media bias if they point that out to the public. edit: typo

    • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      2 months ago

      Reporters think it violates journalist integrity if they correctly identify the MAGA movement as a fascist movement.

      Even your comment is still beating around the bush a little bit. Let’s state it plainly: it violates journalistic integrity that they don’t!

      The media is not misguidedly trying to be “neutral” here; it’s worse than that. They are actively carrying water for the fascists.

      • RubberDuck@lemmy.world
        5·
        2 months ago

        Yeah, giving some random equal time to spout nonsense as an actual subject matter expert is malpractice.

  • jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
    5·
    2 months ago

    “Gacked out on whoop chicken” will replace “gooned on the juice” as my new favorite phrase.