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 […]
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.