sanewash

Verb

sanewash (third-person singular simple present sanewashes, present participle sanewashing, simple past and past participle sanewashed)

1. (intransitive, transitive) To restate one’s perspective to seem more palatable or acceptable.
   • 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.2021 September 22, Jonathan Chait, “What Jonathan Franzen and the Left Get Wrong About Free Speech”, in Intelligencer, retrieved 07 Sep 2024
   • 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.2024, Fredrik deBoer, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, page 53
2. (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.
   • 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 4, Parker Molloy, “How the Media Sanitizes Trump’s Insanity”, in The New Republic
   • 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 9, Matthew Chapman, “Raw Story”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name)