New York Times reporter grilled by MSNBC host over colleagues' 'sane-washing' of Trump

An MSNBC host quizzed a chief White House correspondent for The New York Times on Monday over his questions that his publication has sanitized former President Donald Trump's rambling or incoherent answers.

The newspaper has faced questions over the past month for what critics have called "sane-washing" of Trump's nonsensical answers to questions on key issues. In a report posted Monday, the Times' Peter Baker joined with other colleagues in exploring the overall "disinhibition" of Trump.

MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace tapped into Baker's word, calling it an "interesting choice" because "it correlates with a lot of other age-related degenerative conditions as well."

"It's fascinating," she said.

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"I have wrestled pretty publicly with this question of platforming Trump," Wallace confessed. "When he was president and spreading lies about the caravan, we aggressively cut that — cut away from it because we knew they were lies, and we thought there was a cost to knowingly broadcasting his lies."

What Baker was describing as "screening for our information" Wallace said sounded an awful lot of what "some careful observers of this program and readers of the New York Times have coined as sane-washing, right? Where we pull out the news that he's trying to make because in an effort to not — to strike the right balance, right, to not platform the lies, which I've done, a choice I made years and years ago, we're trying to grasp the one thing we think is relevant. Do you reflect on and rumble with that, Peter Baker?"

The journalist confessed that it is something he struggles with.

"We have to find that balance. It is our job to help readers and viewers to have the information that they need to make an informed decision," said Baker. "How do you do that in a way that doesn't, you know, accentuate untrue statements, false statements, lies, and gives readers and viewers the information they need to evaluate what they're seeing?"

But Baker then pivoted to claim that what the Times was doing wasn't sane-washing.

"I understand it," he said of the critique. "It's not because news organizations are trying to make him sound more like this or that. It's just that there is a concern about how much you go forward in the same way we did in 2016. There's a lot of second-guessing after 2016 by the cable networks, how much should we show, you know, live and unedited. I think the real question here is that news organizations have to provide context, information, fact-checking, and as much full information as they can."

The Times faced questions of sane-washing last month when the newspaper edited Trump's answer about affordable child care to sound more sensical than his rambling answer may have seemed. The Associated Press crafted a logical headline about tariffs based on Trump's answer.

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