sanewashing
sanewashing noun: the practice of restating someone’s rhetoric to render it more palatable or acceptable. Also the present participle and gerund of sanewash.
Noun
sanewashing (uncountable)
- The practice of restating someone’s rhetoric to render it more palatable or acceptable.
- This “sanewashing” of Trump’s statements isn’t just poor journalism; it’s a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy. By continually reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse, major news outlets are failing in their duty to inform...2024 September 4, Parker Molloy, “How the Media Sanitizes Trump’s Insanity”, in The New Republic, retrieved 07 Sep 2024
- The attempt to downplay the radicality of a person or idea to render it more palatable to the general public.
- There’s a hot new term doing the rounds among media critics: “sanewashing.” The term itself actually isn’t new, and it wasn’t born in media-criticism circles, per se; according to Urban Dictionary, it was coined in 2020 on a Reddit page for neoliberals..and meant “attempting to downplay a person or...2024 September 4, Jon Allsop, “Is the press ‘sanewashing’ Trump?”, in Columbia Journalism Review, retrieved 2024-09-00
Also used as
sanewashing is also the present participle and gerund of sanewash.
Origin of sanewashing
From sane + -wash + -ing.
Questions about sanewashing
- What does sanewashing mean?
- Sanewashing means the practice of restating someone’s rhetoric to render it more palatable or acceptable.
- What part of speech is sanewashing?
- Sanewashing is a noun.
Words near sanewashing in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: sanewashing (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “sanewashing.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sanewashing. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.