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 CJR), and meant “attempting to downplay […]
They write completely content-less headlines and articles that are so “neutral” they look like they were written by an extraterrestrial attorney.
Guy A shoots guy B with a gun and they write it up as “spectators allege that the bullet that happened to strike B may likely have originated from the barrel of a gun that A has been said to have held in or around the same period where B happened to be struck”.
I took journalism in high school and the instruction at the time was not to use the fucking passive voice…but that’s all the motherfuckers use…even when covering extremely high stakes shit.