Copaganda
How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
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- $28.99
Publisher Description
In this groundbreaking expose essential for understanding rising authoritarianism, award-winning civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis introduces the concept of “Copaganda.”
Copaganda is a special kind of propaganda employed by police, prosecutors, and news media to stoke fear of police-recorded crime and distort society’s response to it.
What readers will discover:
How mass media manipulates our perception of what keeps us safe.
Why fear of poor people, strangers, immigrants, unhoused people, and people of color is deliberately cultivated.
The ways this fear leads to authoritarian repression, inequality, and massive profits for the punishment bureaucracy.
Why it matters:
For readers of Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky, Copaganda shows how modern news coverage fuels insecurity and distracts us from policies that would truly improve lives and make us safer—like reducing inequality, expanding housing, and investing in healthcare, early childhood education, and climate-friendly city planning.
Hidden in plain sight:
When your local TV station obsessively reports on shoplifting but ignores wage theft, tax evasion, and environmental pollution.
When podcasts talk about a “shortage” of prison guards rather than too many people in prison.
When newspapers quote “experts” calling for more money for police and prisons despite scientific evidence to the contrary.
About the author:
Recognized by Teen Vogue as “one of the most prominent voices” on issues of law and justice, Alec Karakatsanis combines sharp legal expertise, trenchant political analysis, and humorous storytelling to transform the way we consume information.
The result:
A hopeful path forward—towards a healed humanity and a media system invested in real public safety and equality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
American journalists routinely mislead the public when reporting on the police, according to this troubling study. Civil rights lawyer Karakatsanis (Usual Cruelty) argues that police are neglecting their duty to fight and solve crime, citing studies showing officers spend only 4% of their time responding to violent crime and rarely pursue endemic white-collar crimes like wage theft. He contends that such criticism of the police rarely makes it into the news because of the sway held by savvy police PR departments (the LAPD alone employs 25 full-time PR specialists). Karakatsanis's close readings of news articles from major outlets show that journalists habitually regurgitate pro-police narratives—many of which revolve around how more funding for law enforcement is needed to bring down crime rates—and omit the perspectives of non-police experts and studies showing that law enforcement has no correlation with crime rates (which are instead affected by social factors like unemployment). Such pro-funding "propaganda" about law enforcement and crime rates works its way into the news in roundabout ways, Karakatsanis demonstrates; for example, a 2022 Atlantic article suggested that a court backlog in Albuquerque caused an uptick in homicides, implying that resolving the backlog would somehow reduce homicides—not only a nonsensical theory, according to Karakatsanis, but one disproven by the fact that other crimes with similar backlogs saw declines over the same period. Karakatsanis's meticulous study suggests a disturbing lack of analytical ability from reporters. Readers will be aghast.
