sanewashing
noun
| SAYN-waw-shing
Making something considered ‘insane’ seem more ‘sane’
What does sanewashing mean?
Sanewashing refers to the practice of making irrational, extreme, or otherwise problematic people or ideas appear more reasonable or normal than they really are. It is especially used as a liberal criticism of coverage of conservative politics in mainstream media.
Also, sane-washing. Related forms include sanewash, sanewasher.
Examples of sanewashing
Sanewashing has become SO habitual for so much of established media. … Whether it's deliberate, or just [normalcy] bias, I can't always tell. … The world is literally on fire right now, in so many ways, and they're platforming arsonists.
—@jennasaisquoi.bsky.social, Bluesky, 5 Dec. 2024
If you’re terminally online, you already know what “sane-washing” is: It’s the way reporters covering Trump sometimes take a rally speech filled with incoherent asides and falsehoods and deliver bite-sized news nuggets that don’t convey how wild the event was.
—Users first sanewashed its ideas [Reddit forum dedicated to the anti-work movement] to suit their preferences, then gentrified the space to rid it of the rough edges left by its founding crew.
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Where does sanewashing come from?
Sanewashing combines sane, “rational,” and -washing, a combining form based on whitewashing (“glossing over, covering up, minimizing, misrepresenting, etc., faults or wrongdoings”). Greenwashing (“the practice of making a product or activity appear to be more environmentally friendly than it really is”) is an earlier example of this compounding.
Evidence for sanewashing appears online first in the late 2000s and early 2010s in discussions of speculative technology, then in the early 2020s in critiques of social liberalism. The term spread in fall 2024, with the reelection of President Donald Trump, as an objection to supposed ‘soft’ coverage of him in media and journalism.
How is sanewashing used?
Currently, sanewashing is mainly used to criticize mainstream media and journalism perceived as normalizing or sanitizing Donald Trump—and dangerous, unreasonable, or objectionable advisers or agendas associated with him—through euphemistic language, false balance, or other practices. In this way, use of sanewashing is connected to people associated with left-wing or anti-Trump politics.
Its related verb form is sanewash, as in “I canceled my subscription to the newspaper; I couldn’t take how much it sanewashed the administration’s new policies.” A person or organization accused of sanewashing is occasionally called a sanewasher.
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