Sane washing! What a great term. And I think you're right to insist that journalists should be letting the public see the whole truth. If a politician or other public official delivers messaging that's incoherent or perhaps intentionally hard to understand, shouldn't the public know that? Wouldn't it affect the kind of decisions they make?

I'm reminded of a story I wrote last week about a small town in New England where the high school football team brutally beat a 16-year-old transgender boy who used to be on the team.

There's quite a significant set of facts known about the case, including the fact that the local police chief made a statement.

I had access to his entire statement, and I wrote about a key element of it, that he was having his department investigate the incident as a hate crime, "out of an abundance of caution."

To me, that part of his statement was significant, because it would tend to indicate that he doubted the assault would meet the legal definition of hate crime.

Over the next few days, a few more news sources picked up the story from initial local news reports.

I noticed that later stories pretty much all omitted the "abundance of caution" part of his statement, which significantly changes how the statement can be received and interpreted.

I can think of any number of reasons why a reporter or an editor might leave that out, one of them being that the police chief asked them to.

And maybe he had good reason to. Maybe he misspoke. Maybe he didn't understand how his statement would be received. Maybe he really does think it's likely that the assault meets the legal definition of a hate crime.

Maybe not.

But one thing's for sure. Without the public being aware of the actual words he used, they're not able to make of a yruly informed judgment about the effectiveness of his involvement in the case.

And another thing's for sure. The editors who are removing that part of his statement from their news stories are helping to misinform the public.