During a September 2024 speech at the Economic Club of New York, Donald Trump was asked about childcare policy. He offered a rambling, 374-word response:

Well, I would do that, and we're sitting down – you know, I was somebody – we had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter, Ivanka, was so impactful on that issue. It's a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I'm talking about – because, look, childcare is childcare. It's something – you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I'm talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they're not used to – but they'll get used to it very quickly. And it's not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they'll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country […]

The response, which failed to address the question, suggested Trump had given little serious prior thought to the topic. It also offered a window into the scattered nature of his thinking.

Yet many subsequent news stories largely ignored the fumble. Instead, they reported earnestly on the policy proposals from the scripted portions of his speech. The New York Times article about the event was headlined "Trump calls for an efficiency commission, an idea pushed by Elon Musk." It referenced his "jumbled and meandering answer" only once, and not until the 24th paragraph.

For many frustrated observers, this was a textbook example of what has come to be known as "sanewashing."

What Is 'Sanewashing'?

"Sanewashing" describes the tendency of journalists — particularly those covering Trump — to focus on the coherent and conventional parts of what he says while overlooking his often bizarre, incoherent digressions (such as his repeated references to the fictional movie character Hannibal Lecter). The term gained significant traction on social media during the 2024 campaign, where users circulated unedited clips and full transcripts alongside news summaries to highlight the gap between what Trump actually said and how it was reported.

Critics argue that by doing so, journalists present the public with an inaccurate picture of Trump, potentially obscuring his more extreme and dangerous ideas and raising questions about whether he is fit to govern.

The context is significant: during the 2024 campaign, Joe Biden faced intense scrutiny over his declining physical and mental capacities, which ultimately led the then-president to drop out of the race in August 2024. Many observers felt Trump was equally — if not more — cognitively unfit for office, but that this was not apparent to voters because journalists were sanitizing his rhetoric. The criticism fed into a longer-running debate about "both-sidesism" and false equivalence in political journalism that has persisted since Trump first entered national politics in 2015.

Some commentators went further, suggesting this pattern revealed an underlying media "bias" that benefited Trump's electoral prospects.

However, newly published research from Queensland University of Technology tells a more nuanced story.

Investigating Sanewashing in the 2024 Election

Researchers Stephen Harrington, Ella Chorazy, and Timothy Graham of Queensland University of Technology sought to determine whether journalists had indeed sanewashed Trump during the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election. The study, published in the peer-reviewed SAGE journal Journalism Practice, applies computational text analysis methods to a question that had previously been debated largely through anecdote and individual examples.

They focused on two speeches that had drawn significant attention for potential sanewashing. The first was the childcare exchange mentioned above. The second was a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where Trump made an off-color remark about Arnold Palmer that was widely interpreted as a reference to the size of the late golfer's genitals.

The research team took the text of both speeches along with hundreds of news articles that referenced them in the following weeks — drawing from both traditional newspaper sources and less-traditional online outlets — and ran them through a series of computational analyses.

Their results show there is some evidence that sanewashing did occur around both speeches. Reporters, on the whole, tended to concentrate on just one or two key topics Trump discussed, using substantially different language than the now-president employed.

However, the pattern was not consistent across all coverage.

Journalists covering Trump's economics speech focused primarily on themes of taxation and government spending, largely overlooking his incoherent answer on childcare. By contrast, when covering the Latrobe rally, journalists were far more willing to discuss the comments about Palmer — a tendency seen more frequently in online outlets than in mainstream newspapers.

The researchers also found that, despite media criticism, there was substantial meta-commentary on Trump's incoherent speaking style. Online outlets tended to use more forceful language ("weird," "bizarre"), while traditional outlets opted for more measured terms ("meandering," "erratic"). This suggests that journalists at publications like the New York Times may feel greater pressure to adhere to notions of impartiality, limiting their ability to directly call out the extraordinary aspects of Trump's rhetoric.

Is Sanewashing Inherently Problematic?

A broader question is whether sanewashing is fundamentally problematic.

Accurate journalism matters, but stenography — reprinting everything a politician says verbatim — is not desirable either. In practice, sanewashing may be an inevitable byproduct of journalism itself: the natural process of filtering out information deemed less relevant in favor of what is most consequential.

Very often, journalists get those editorial calls right.

To illustrate, the researchers returned to the New York Times article mentioned earlier: "Trump calls for an efficiency commission, an idea pushed by Elon Musk." The commission referenced in that headline became the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was later responsible for — among other things — the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). That act alone has been forecast to result01186-9/fulltext) in as many as 14 million excess deaths worldwide — a far more consequential story than a failed answer on childcare.

The challenge for journalists, the research suggests, is to continue drawing attention to Trump's unusual tangents without allowing them to distract from the more serious policy ideas underneath. As the researchers note, this tension is unlikely to disappear: Trump's unscripted speaking style will continue to test the norms of political reporting, and the public will continue to rely on editorial choices — imperfect as they may be — to make sense of it.

Stephen Harrington, Associate Professor, School of Communication, Queensland University of Technology; Ella Chorazy, Senior Research Associate, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology; and Timothy Graham, Associate Professor in Digital Media, Queensland University of Technology.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.