Скачать или смотреть Rick Perlstein on how the media 'sanewashes' Donald Trump and Republicans

As he nears the end of his third presidential campaign, Donald Trump is falling apart in public view. He’s holding far fewer public events than ever before where he constantly goes off on bizarre and irrelevant tangents and conspiracy theories about everything from sharks and hurricanes to Kamala Harris’s headphones.

But most people don’t tune into his rallies. Instead, they hear about them from the mainstream media, which often delivers a highly sanitized version of Trump’s insane rants that makes them seem much more normal than they really are.

My friend Parker Molloy calls this pattern of media behavior “sanewashing,” which I think is an accurate description to describe what mainstream journalists have been doing with Trump since he first began running for president in 2015. Whenever Trump retreats from verbatim interviews and focuses only on his rally speeches, his approval ratings go up.

Kamala Harris alluded to this problem during the debate she had with Trump a few weeks ago when she urged the audience to tune in and actually hear the insane and incoherent things he says.

Unfortunately, sanewashing isn’t something that began with Donald Trump, however. Using public relations strategies and playing upon people’s natural inclination to assume good-faith in others, reactionary Republicans figured out how to hack the liberal epistemology by lying. Long before Trump began conning America, far-right activists realized that there’s no limit to what you can accomplish once you realize you never have to tell the truth.

As a result, the American press has been sanitizing Republican radicalism for many decades now: They cleaned up the image of the Tea Party. They refused to question George W. Bush’s Iraq War. They didn’t tell the full story of Newt Gingrich’s fanaticism. And they didn’t fully cover the radicalism of Ronald Reagan and his staff.

TIMECODES
00:00 Introduction
07:22 Sanewashing is obsolete journalism for a Republican party that no longer exists
11:56 Flashback: How the mainstream media sanitized the Tea Party
24:00 How Republicans and Democrats handle unpopular policies differently
28:21 How Tea Party activists manipulated the media
31:54 William F. Buckley, inventor of sanewashing
37:09 Sanewashing as a hack of liberal epistemology
47:20 The one positive thing about sanewashing
53:00 The left hasn't understood the value of alternative media yet

MEMBERSHIP BENEFITS
This is a free episode of Theory of Change, but in order to keep the show sustainable, the full audio, video, and transcript for some episodes are available to subscribers only. The deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help.

Please join today to get full access!

Substack:
https://theoryofchange.show/

Patreon:
  / discoverflux  

If you would like to support the show but don’t want to subscribe, you can also send one-time donations via PayPal:
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/theor...

If you're not able to support financially, please help us by subscribing and/or leaving a nice review on Apple Podcasts. Doing this helps other people find Theory of Change and our great guests.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...

 
ABOUT THE SHOW
Theory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux Community, a new content network of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.

Get access to all the Flux podcasts, including our comedy news panel show, Doomscroll, and our culture and identity discussion, So This Just Happened: https://linktr.ee/discoverflux

Theory of Change on Twitter:   / theorychange  

Theory of Change on YouTube:    / @theoryofchangepodcast  

Matthew Sheffield on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield

Matthew Sheffield on Twitter:   / mattsheffield