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NEW YORK (AP) — Nearly a decade into the Trump Era of politics, less than a month from his third Election Day as the Republican candidate for president and there is still remarkably little consensus within the media about how best to cover Donald Trump.

Are reporters “sanewashing” Trump, or are they succumbing to the “banality of crazy?” Should his rallies be aired at length, or not at all? To fact-check or not fact-check?

“If it wasn’t so serious, I would just be fascinated by all of it,” said Parker Molloy, media critic and author of The Present Age column on Substack. “If it didn’t have to do with who is going to be president, I would watch this and marvel at how difficult it is to cover one person who seems to challenge all of the rules of journalism.”

Books and studies will be written about Trump and the press long after he is gone. He’s always been press-conscious and press-savvy, even as a celebrity builder in Manhattan who took a keen interest in what tabloid gossip columns said about him. Most issues stem from Trump’s disdain for constraints, his willingness to say the outrageous and provably untrue, and for his fans to believe him instead of those reporting on him.

It has even come full circle, where some experts now think the best way to cover him is to give people a greater opportunity to hear what he says — the opposite of what was once conventional wisdom.

‘Sanewashing’ creates an alternative narrative, some say

Molloy first used the phrase “sanewashing” this fall to describe a tendency among journalists to launder some of Trump’s wilder or barely coherent statements to make them seem like the cogent pronouncements of a typical politician. One example she cites: CNN distilling a Trump post on Truth Social that rambled on about the “radical left” and “fake news” into a straight news lead about the former president agreeing to debate his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

At its best, polishing Trump creates an alternative narrative, she said. At its worst, it’s misinformation.

During a Wisconsin rally the last weekend of September, Trump talked of danger from criminals allowed in the country illegally. “They will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat,” he said. The New Republic writer Michael Tomasky was surprised not to find the quote in The New York Times’ and Washington Post’s coverage, although The Times noted that Trump vilified undocumented immigrants, and there were other media references to what Trump himself called a dark speech.

“Trump constantly saying extreme, racist violent stuff can’t always be new,” Tomasky wrote. “But it is always reality. Is the press justified in ignoring reality just because it isn’t new?”

One likely reason the remark didn’t get that much attention is because Trump — at the same rally — referred to Harris without evidence as “mentally disabled.”

That comment merited quick mention on the ABC and CBS evening newscasts the next day, in the context of criticism from two fellow Republicans, and after stories about Hurricane Helene’s devastation and war in the Middle East. NBC’s “Nightly News” didn’t bring it up at all.

In other words, Trump said something wild. What’s new? More than sanewashing, political scientist Brian Klaas calls that the banality of crazy, where journalists become accustomed to things Trump says that would be shocking coming from other candidates simply because they’re numbed to it.

It’s a hard fit for a daily news cycle

Illuminating reporting on Trump rarely fits the model of quick news stories that sum up daily developments. “This really serves the small group of news consumers that we would call news junkies, who follow the campaign day to day,” said Kelly McBride, senior vice president of the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank. “But it doesn’t help people decide how to vote, or understand the candidate better.”

Trump critics often complain about how the nation’s leading news outlets cover him. But they sometimes overlook attempts to bring perspective to issues they’re concerned with. The Times, for example, used a computer to compare his speeches now with older ones in a story Sunday, and similarly had a Sept. 9 examination of questions about Trump’s age and mental capacity. The Post has written about how Trump doesn’t mention his father’s Alzheimer’s Disease as he attacks others about mental capacity, and distortions about a cognitive test he took. The Associated Press wrote of Trump’s Wisconsin rally that he “shifted from topic to topic so quickly that it was hard to keep track of what he meant at times.”

“Trump is a really difficult figure to cover because he challenges news media processes every day, has for years,” The Times’ Maggie Haberman, one of Trump’s best-known chroniclers, told NPR last month. “The systems … were not built to deal with somebody who says things that are not true as often as he does or speaks as incoherently as he often does. I think the media has actually done a good job showing people who he is, what he says, what he does.”

Press critics may instead be frustrated that the work doesn’t have the impact they seek. “The people who don’t like or are infuriated by him cannot believe his success and would like the press to somehow persuade the people who do like him that they are wrong,” said Tom Rosenstiel, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland. “And the press can’t do that.”

Fact-checking is a bone of contention

One of the central issues surrounding the three general election debates was how, or whether, the television networks would fact-check the candidates in real time on the air.

CNN didn’t during Trump’s debate with President Joe Biden last spring. When ABC’s moderators corrected Trump four times during his September debate with Harris, the former president’s supporters were infuriated. CBS News sought a middle ground during the vice presidential debate, and learned how hard it is to satisfy everyone.

“F you CBS — how DARE YOU,” Megyn Kelly posted on X when CBS briefly cut JD Vance ‘s microphone after correcting him on a comment about immigrants. Salon media critic Melanie McFarland wrote that the people best equipped to point out truth “barely rose to that duty.”

The fact-check industry flourished during Trump’s years in office, the number of such websites devoted to that duty jumping from 63 in 2016 to 79 in 2020, according to the Duke Reporters’ Lab. Yet limitations were also exposed: Republicans demonized the practice, to the point where many Trump supporters either don’t believe those who try to referee what’s true or false, or don’t bother reading. In day-to-day reporting, it’s not enough to point out when a politician is wrong, Rosenstiel said. They must clearly explain why.

Journalists, who rarely win popularity contests to begin with, saw their collective reputations plummet under withering attacks from Trump.

In the heady days of 2015, television news networks like CNN showed Trump campaign rallies at length. It was entertaining. It drove ratings. What harm could be done?

Many later regretted that decision. Throughout his presidency and beyond, television outlets that are not Trump-friendly have grappled with the question of how much to show Trump unfiltered, and still haven’t fully settled on an answer. CNN shows Trump at rallies on occasion, rarely at length.

But in a back-to-the-future move, some experts now say it’s best to let people hear what Trump says. Poynter’s McBride praised The 19th for a story on child care when, frustrated by an attempt to clarify Trump’s positions with his campaign, the website simply printed a baffling 365-word direct quote from Trump when he was asked about the issue.

While fact checks and context have their place, there’s value in presenting Trump in the raw. “Showing Trump at length is not sanewashing,” Rosenstiel said.

Molloy admitted to some surprise at how much traction her original column on sanewashing received. It may reflect a desire to define the undefinable, to figure out what the news media still hasn’t been able to after all this time. She notes the politicians who try to emulate Trump but fail.

“They don’t have what makes him Donald Trump,” she said. “People can look at it as part of his brilliance and people can look at it as him being crazy. It’s probably a little of both.”

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David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder.

A top U.S. commercial bakery is pushing back on a Food and Drug Administration warning to stop using labels that say its products contain sesame — a potentially dangerous allergen — when they don’t.

Bimbo Bakeries USA, which includes brands such as Sarah Lee, Entenmann’s and Ball Park buns and rolls, appears to be defying an FDA warning sent in June that said the several of the company’s products are “misbranded” because the labels list sesame or tree nuts even though those ingredients aren’t in the foods.

In a response to the FDA, Bimbo officials said they wouldn’t change their sesame labeling. The company said it creates “nationally uniform labels” that prevent people from inadvertently eating foods that can trigger potentially life-threatening reactions. The firm said it was not attempting to avoid legal requirements to avoid cross-contamination in plants.

“We think our approach is the most protective of sesame-allergic consumers,” the company wrote in a July 1 letter obtained by the advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest and shared with The Associated Press.

Bimbo officials confirmed their position in an email to the AP on Wednesday, calling it a “conservative approach” for consistent labeling of nationally distributed products.

FDA officials did not immediately comment on the company’s response. By law, the agency can take actions ranging from recalls to civil fines and criminal charges against firms that fail to heed warning letters.

But CSPI and other food safety advocates said the standoff continues a practice that misleads the estimated 33 million Americans with food allergies and results in limited choices for the more than 1.6 million who are allergic to sesame.

“We depend on accurate food labeling to feel safe,” said Sung Poblete, chief executive of the nonprofit group FARE, Food Allergy Research & Education. “We depend on accurate labeling to make the food choices that we make.”

The impasse follows a 2023 federal law that requires that all foods made and sold in the U.S. to be labeled if they contain sesame.

Bimbo Bakeries, which bills itself as the nation’s largest commercial baking company, was among several food producers and restaurant chains that began adding small amounts of sesame to foods that didn’t have it previously — and then listing it as an ingredient.

Several companies said they did that because it was too difficult and expensive to keep sesame used in one part of a baking plant out of another and they wanted to avoid liability and cost. The FDA has said that such actions are legal, although they violate the spirit of the law.

In its response to the FDA, Bimbo said it has plants where some products are made with sesame and some are not. But when it came to labeling, the company said that the most “protective approach” for consumers was to declare sesame as an ingredient and use the same packaging for all of the products.

However, Bimbo officials told the agency they did change labels for certain breads that said they included tree nuts when they did not. The new labels now say the breads include hazelnut, the only nut used in the products, the company indicated.

CSPI had petitioned FDA in 2023 to halt the practice of adding sesame to foods to prevent risks of cross-contamination. It’s not clear what action the agency will take over Bimbo’s refusal to heed a warning letter, said Sarah Sorscher, CSPI’s director of regulatory affairs.

“It’s so unusual to see a big company like Bimbo calling the FDA’s bluff,” she added.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

TORONTO – Ontario is launching a review of the province’s 37 non-Indigenous children’s aid societies, looking at the quality of protection they provide and their financial management.

Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services officials say they are beginning a process today to look for an outside contractor to conduct the review, which comes one week after Premier Doug Ford criticized the societies in a press conference.

Ford said he has heard “nightmare stories about the abuse of taxpayers’ money,” suggesting the agencies are working in places he referred to as Taj Mahals, and managers are giving themselves bonuses.

In response to those comments, the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies said the number of children with complex needs is rising, and that there are systemic barriers to providing highly specialized, intensive early intervention and prevention supports.

Ministry officials who provided a background briefing on the review today say that societies’ deficits are continuing to rise and the audit will examine the underlying issues and possible solutions.

The officials, who spoke on condition they not be identified, say the review will focus on service quality, consistency of services, out-of-home placements, finances, executive compensation, staffing models, cost structures, capital assets and integration with community supports.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 9, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.