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 (which Linda Kinstler wrote about recently for ...
Seems like a problem springing from the press's bias towards neutrality, or how sometimes a politician is objectively wrong but the press treats them with kid gloves for fear of being accused of unfairness.
They can't print Trump's entire 3 minute rant, and they're scared to characterize it as meandering or incoherent, even if that's the best description. So, they print a single line from his rant and provide their own context.
Towards the appearance of neutrality, you mean. When person A says "2+2=4" and person B says "2+2=5", "neutrality" is not reporting some kind of false compromise at 4 1/2, but instead factually reporting that person A is correct and person B is wrong!
Edit: Neutral (adjective): not helping or supporting either side in a conflict, disagreement, etc.
Are you a big enough baby to downvote because you don't like what words mean? Neutrality and correctness are two different things. Objectivity does factor in what the facts are, neutrality doesn't.
It is absolutely neutral. You're mixing up neutrality with equivalence. Just because a neutral party reports on something that's clearly incorrect doesn't mean they are sponsoring or supporting it over something else, nor is it saying they are equally valid claims.
The purpose of neutral reporting is to have a record of what happened, not to judge it right or wrong. Unfortunately, sometimes (a lot of the time, nowadays) noteworthy events involve unpleasant and/or malicious actors, but we can't just shun them from history because their purposes are ignoble.
2+2 is actually 5
I've read it in a book with a bunch of numbers as a title. its basic knowledge, just like:
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength
Agreed. Their motivation is money, and there’s more money in keeping the election a neck & neck horse race, even if one of the horses is rabid, lame, and in every way unfit to run. They’ll downplay his blaring faults, and magnify any tiny fault they can find in his competition, just to keep the race “fair” - for ad revenue.