What is Copaganda, and How do We Fight It?

We might not realize it, but we are swimming in a sea of what this episode’s guest calls Copaganda. The way media outlets decide what stories to cover, which experts to quote, and even what supposedly objective words to use in news stories, profoundly impact how we view the world we live in.

In his book, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, our guest Alec Karakatsanis breaks down what Copaganda is, why media outlets and powerful figures deploy it, and how it shapes our understanding of crime rates, what types of crimes matter, and what the solutions are for achieving public safety.

Please download, rate, review, and subscribe to Rights This Way. It will help more people find this podcast.

Resources

Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

Alec’s Organization Civil Rights Corps

Hero-worship of Police is Failing Us

Why Can’t We Stop Backtracking on Bail Reform?

Transcript

Simon: [00:00:00] We might not realize it, but we are swimming in a sea of what this episode’s guest calls “Copaganda,” the way media outlets decide what stories to cover, which experts to quote and even what supposedly objective words to use in news stories profoundly impact how we view the world we live in.

In his book Copaganda:, How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, author, lawyer, and former public defender, Alec Karakatsanis breaks down what Copaganda is, why media outlets and powerful figures deploy it, and how it shapes our understanding of crime rates, what types of crimes matter, and what the solutions are for achieving public safety. We’ll speak with Alec about all of this in just a moment, but first, I’d like to ask you to please download, rate, review, and subscribe to Rights This Way. It will help more people find this podcast.

Welcome to Rights This Way, a podcast from the New York Civil Liberties Union, the A [00:01:00] CLU of New York State. I’m Simon McCormack, senior staff writer at the NYCLU, and your host for this podcast, which is focused on the civil rights and liberties issues that impact New Yorkers most.

Before we get started, just a quick note that outside guests on this show do not represent the NYCLU, and their views are their own. 

And now I’m joined by Alec Karakatsanis. He is the founder of Civil Rights Corps, an attorney and former public defender, and the author of the new book, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News. Alec, welcome to Rights This Way. 

Alec: Thanks so much for having me.

Simon: Of course, of course. So, I just wanna start off by asking you to please give us a quick definition of what you mean by Copaganda, and also tell us why you wrote this book.

Alec: For me, Copaganda really has three main [00:02:00] components to it. The first thing Copaganda does is it narrows our conception of safety and threat. It has us afraid of poor people of color, immigrants, strangers, right? And it has us ignoring lots of other, much, much bigger threats, like air pollution kills a hundred thousand people every single year, much of it is criminal acts of air pollution, right? It’s five times all homicide combined or water pollution, very similar. Wage theft is $50 billion a year. That’s like five times all property crime combined in the United States, or tax evasion, which is like a trillion dollars a year. But Copaganda in the news basically ignores all of that stuff and has us focused on- the police are arresting very poor people for doing, right. So that’s the first thing it does, is it narrows our conception of what we feel urgently about and what we’re afraid of. 

And then the second thing it does is, now that it’s made us afraid of only a small, narrow range of people and things, it has us constantly thinking that the risk from those [00:03:00] things is going up, up, right? So, we’re more and more and more afraid at all times, and that’s why over the last 25 years, every single year, people in the polls say crime is up, right? Even though crime has been down almost every single one of those years, and so much so that we are now at, like, historic low levels of crime on like a 50, 60 year timeline, like the lowest it’s been, right?

Interestingly, when you ask people about crime in their own neighborhoods, they’re much more likely to be accurate. So, it’s when their understanding is manipulated by the news,when they’re talking about areas other than where they live, they think crime is up – much more than what they think crime is up in their community, when they’re basing their views more on their own experience. So, that’s the second thing it does. 

And then the third thing is probably the most important feature of Copaganda is having narrowed our conception of threat and made us more and more afraid, it tells us that the solution to all of our fears is more and more investment in the punishment bureaucracy.

This is kind of like climate science denial or like [00:04:00] a modern kind of flat earther movement, right? Because all of the evidence that we know from around the world, from US history, from all over the world, from contemporary studies, is that the things that lead to more harm and violence in our society have nothing to do with investments in the punishment bureaucracy. So, they have nothing to do with like, you know, is this prosecutor a little bit more progressive than that prosecutor? Or is there 14 cops on this patrol or 11? Or is the sentence for this crime nine years or seven years? Like, that stuff has nothing to do with levels of violence. What actually determines how safe we are as a society is big things like levels of inequality and poverty, access to healthcare, early childhood education is a huge one, levels of isolation and loneliness in a society versus like levels of engagement and activities for young people, etc. Lead poisoning. Toxic masculinity. That could go on and on and on. Housing, right? So, that’s a huge part of Copaganda [00:05:00] is distracting us from really the material conditions of our lives and telling us that, like, the solution to all of our fears is these little tweaks and investments in the bureaucracies of state oppression and control.

Simon: Yeah, thank you for laying that out. And what made you want to write this book?

Alec: As I looked across the news media and the public discourse more broadly, I was seeing massive distortions in-so the way that people were communicating these basic truths, right? So, all over the country, we would be winning these cases, or we’d be highlighting these incredibly ineffective policies and injustices.

And even in the places that we were winning, the powers that controlled these systems were trying to implement so-called solutions that were just another label on the same old injustice. And so, that was allowed to happen because people were fundamentally being misled about the nature of the problems.

So, I wanted to try to take a [00:06:00] step back and really peel away the layers of how is it that as a society we are investing, more than any society in the recorded history of the modern world, in punishment bureaucracy, in police, prosecutors, prisons, the multi-billion dollar industries that are parasitic on every single stage of that process, when all of the evidence points those things not being the best investment for our safety and actually in fact, making us less safe. So, what is the propaganda mechanism through which this is happening? How are people being so massively misled by this, and what can we do about it? I wanted to write like a funny and accessible analysis of that for people and to tell a lot of well-meaning people stuff that they didn’t know about how they were being misled.

Simon: Yeah, that makes sense. And I also just want to drill down on one of the things you mentioned in your previous answer, which is, you know, there is a lot of focus on things like [00:07:00] say, shoplifting. Or here in New York, there’s a lot of emphasis on fare evasion in the subways, but there is not much coverage of things like environmental offenses, as you said, wage theft, those sorts of things.

So, I’m curious why you think that is the sort of- the balance of media coverage.

Alec: There’s a lot of different reasons. It’s not just one reason, unfortunately, right? There’s a lot of different news outlets. There’s a lot of different people at different stages in the news production process. There’s a lot of different forms of news media ownership, and so different people in this ecosystem have very different incentives. And there’s also just multiple reasons in general.

I’ll just go through a few of them. One is that the local news gathering process, and to some extent, national news as well, has been really defunded in a way that renders the capacity of local news organizations to do investigative [00:08:00] reporting and to just do basic news gathering has really diminished, like the number of people working in local news is very low compared to years ago and so, this creates a huge opportunity for the police who have massive multi-billion dollar PR industry. You know, take the Chicago police, when they killed Laquan McDonald had four full-time PR officials. 10 years later, they have over 50. The Los Angeles sheriff has 42 full-time PR people. LAPD has another 25. New York has 90 or so, right? These are just a few police departments, right? So, we’re talking about, over the course of the country, tens of thousands of people working full-time on curating and producing the news. So, when a local news outlet has to fill 22 minutes of coverage at 6:30 and 7 and 10:30 and 11:00 PM, the police not only send them, you know, snippets of who they’ve arrested, but they send them video, audio, charts, graphs, people to quote, experts to identify, right? So, [00:09:00] they basically produce the news for people. So, that’s a huge factor is the sort of like the bureaucratic workflow of news organizations, and the sort of political economy of how these organizations are set up makes it very easy to manipulate if you have a large PR propaganda apparatus. And the same is not true of civil rights lawyers or public defenders, or teachers unions or nurses unions, or the people that test our soil, or our water for lead, etc. These people don’t have PR departments. They don’t have the ability to intervene in the news production process. So, that’s one big thing. Another big thing is the ownership of the media, right? So, news outlets tend to be owned by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in our society, and those people have particular interests. And it would be a mistake to think that people who own the news media would own those outlets if they were generally speaking, advocating for or leading people to believe that our society needed major transformations in terms of becoming more equal, for example, let’s say. Another big factor is just ideology of the [00:10:00] editors and producers, and reporters. These people have been themselves heavily propagandized. They come from particular social, political, and cultural classes and networks, right? And they have certain beliefs about the way our society works. And they, themselves, have been massively, I’m convinced of certain basic mythologies that operate to perpetuate Copaganda. So, those are just some of the reasons that come to mind. But there are actually more that I talk about in the book, and I think it’s really important to try to understand those mechanisms if we’re gonna intervene in them.

Simon: Absolutely. And yes, I, I should have said at the start, but folks should understand that we’re just getting a little flavor of the book in this interview. And, people who are intrigued and want to learn more should definitely pick up the book. You also have a chapter called “Progressives Want a Pro-crime Hellscape,” and that immediately stood out to me because we at the NYCLU are constantly batting back allegations, you know? Yeah. That, we [00:11:00] don’t understand, public safety, we’re pro crime. Anytime we want to say, you know, get police officers out of dealing with most mental health emergencies, anytime we want to advocate for closing Rikers, or reducing sentences, or parole reform, etc., on and on, we get tagged with some version of the title of that chapter. Can you talk about how the media use, and I don’t mean you to just to go to bat for the NYCLU, of course, but I think many of our listeners as well are committed to a more fair and just criminal legal system. And so, I’m curious if you can talk about how the media uses this framing to stamp out anything that would seriously challenge the status quo on policing and punishment.

Alec: I’m so glad you asked about this because there’s so much to say about this, and this is one of my favorite couple of chapters of the book about this. I think that one of the most important things to say is that the news media only can accomplish this by [00:12:00] systematically removing from stories, the actual content of what progressives are saying and proposing and the actual context within which they’re proposing it.

So, one of the things I note in the book is that hardly ever does the news media accurately describe in any detail whatsoever the really good policies that progressives are proposing. It- instead, they tend to write articles that are about the sort of reaction of people to the progressive policy, so they say something like, well, people are worried that policy is not popular. Or, you know, politicians are concerned that the policy doesn’t take crime seriously, right? But like they actually like need to hide from the public what the content of those policies is because whenever those policies are actually polled, and I show this also in the book, they’re extraordinarily popular policies, right? And that’s related to a second thing, which is that they systematically hide the evidence about those policies. So all these discussions in the news media are these sort of like [00:13:00] unhinged, like evidence-free, kind of like vibes-based conversations about these policies that all neglect one crucial thing.What does the actual evidence show, right? 

And that’s another sort of really important feature of this, is that the actual evidence supports those progressive policies. So in an article, for example, about whether there should be a lot of cops in schools, it just won’t include what the evidence says about whether cops in schools make kids safer, right? And it- and I give a lot of examples in the book about sort of hit pieces on particular progressive politicians, etc., that just like actually refuse to even tell the public what the progressive politician is proposing and what are the state of affairs and the historical and policy context that in which other stuff, like, more carceral policies were tried and failed and had bad results, right? So, and by hiding all of that, they sort of make progressives out to be like pie in the sky, naive people who like [00:14:00] don’t really have a plan, but they like, don’t like discrimination, and they don’t like the police, and so they paint them as sort of these like incompetent, impractical kind of like people. That then leads many readers and viewers to the inescapable conclusion that progressives just like you know, don’t care about crime because if they cared about crime, surely they’d have a plan. And so the systemic news practice of actually hiding from people the content of the plan further contributes to the propaganda point that these people don’t have a plan. They don’t care.

Simon: Right. And kind of along those lines, you write that quote, “One of the most overlooked aspects of contemporary news analysis is how the volume of certain news stories distorts our understanding of what is important and reflects the priorities of those in power.” You kind of touched on this in a previous answer, but can you expand on this and also specifically talk about the example of Mayor Adams’ first campaign for mayor. This [00:15:00] is in 2021.

Alec: Yeah, so one of the easiest ways to get people really concerned about something or to really ignore something else is in terms of the number of news stories, the sheer volume of news stories about a particular issue. So you could take, let’s say retail theft. There was a viral video of a retail theft from Walgreens a few years ago in San Francisco that that got tens of millions of views.

That single video spawned 309 local news stories within 28 days around the country. At the same time, there was not a single story nationally about wage theft by Walgreens, right? So, but the retail theft, the sheer volume of those stories sparked a moral panic about retail theft, which led many governors, including Illinois, California, New York, Governor Hochul to devote massive new resources to supposedly crushing an increase in retail theft, which we now know was non-existent.

[00:16:00] Retail theft was not up. Okay, so, but it was portrayed to be up through the sheer volume of news. I think the best way to understand this is also to think about, you know, the Mayor Adams mayoral race, where if you look at a graph of the number of times that Adams and the media mentioned shootings, it has no correlation whatsoever to actual shootings in New York. Instead, the correlations are all based on political moments in the campaign and in his election, right? So, often times what the news is making us feel afraid about and focused on and urgently, you know, wanting to address is not related to any objective fact about the world, like there actually being more shootings or not, but it’s related instead to the political goals of the people who are driving the news.

So, news volume is absolutely crucial and I think, you know, this is incidentally one of the biggest problems in our entire [00:17:00] media ecosystem is that some of the very biggest problems in our world, like poverty or climate change, or, you know, I think the plastic pollution epidemic is a good example, so there’s trillions and trillions of pieces of plastic illegally spewed into our ecosystems in the United States every year, so much so that all of us, like as I’m talking to you right now, we each have about a spoonful of plastic in our brains, and this is having profound effects on human and animal and plant life across the globe.

It’s almost never reported in the news, right? Maybe like once a year. Some outlet will do a big deep dive investigative story, and everyone you know who sees it is like, “Oh my goodness,” and shares it with a friend or whatever. But people don’t feel urgently about it because we’re not getting push alerts on our phone, and we’re not seeing front page or local news headlines every single day about the epidemic of plastic pollution, or you could replace plastic with any of the other sort of huge catastrophic issues of our time. But we’re seeing [00:18:00] instead local news stories, you know, seven out of the nine stories on the local TV telecast will be some kind of like poor person, or person of color, or immigrant accused of some kind of low-level crime.

So, that volume makes people feel really, really, really urgently about certain kinds of crime and really not urgent about other kinds of crime like environmental pollution.

Simon: Yeah, that totally makes sense. And in your chapter, “Keywords of Copaganda, Smuggling Ideology into the News,” you argue that the media uses terms like “major” or “sweeping” and “overhaul” in deceptive ways. I found this chapter quite interesting. Can you explain how this is done?

Alec: Yeah, so there’s so many ways in which sophisticated propagandists can smuggle their own ideology under the guise of sort of neutrality. So, some of those examples I think are quite telling, although I give a lot more in the book that I think are really interesting. So, for example, just by [00:19:00] reporting, “What is New York gonna do about the shortage of guards on Rikers?”

Or “What is New York gonna do about the current shortage of NYPD officers?”, right? Just by using the word “shortage,” they’ve smuggled in one of the most controversial issues in our entire society. Like, is there actually a shortage of guards at Rikers, right? So, right now, there’s like thousands and thousands of guards on Rikers at any given moment who are just fraudulently calling in sick or on some kind of otherwise questionable leave, right? There’s been really good media reporting about this sort of huge wave of fraud at Rikers in terms of guards, but also just more profoundly with the police shortage and prison guard shortage around the country stories. That is making a very controversial political claim that say the problem is too few guards as opposed to, let’s say, too many people in prison, right? But like by framing the problem that way and using those words, they weigh in on a really controversial topic. The same is true of, you know, the way [00:20:00] that words like “major” or “sweeping” or “overhaul” are used, right? So, there might be like a really tiny change that like the Queens D.A. might make to their policies, and the New York Times might call it sweeping, right? Now, this is designed to narrow the range of possibilities that readers can imagine, right? Because if- if a really, really tiny little tweak that actually doesn’t do much is described as “sweeping,” then anybody who’s to the left of that, who’s proposing something much more significant, is gonna be viewed as kind of like outside the bounds of reality.

And also, the Queens D.A. has an interest in people thinking they’re like a major reformer and doing like, sweeping new changes when in fact they’re actually just doing the same old stuff, right? So, the news can just by its own complicity using these words can suggest that things that actually aren’t changing these horrible bureaucracies of pain and punishment and fraud and waste and abuse and corruption and violence, are actually like [00:21:00] doing much more work than they actually are. So, I try to explain that phenomenon with a lot of examples and with a little bit more nuance in the book because it’s absolutely vital that people start looking at like, how are the words that are being used to describe these things subtly tipping the scales for casual readers who maybe aren’t reading it that closely, who now might go tell somebody at the water cooler at work that there’s major changes afoot at the Queen’s DA’s office, even though that DA’s office is still only almost exclusively prosecuting poor people, still engaged in all of the same forms of corruption and misconduct that they had been engaged in before.

Very little has changed. They’re not prosecuting wealthy people or corporations. They’re not really doing anything differently whatsoever, except for now they have some little tiny tweak that actually might even just be a PR stunt, like, a conviction integrity unit or something like that actually doesn’t really exonerate anybody is portrayed as some kind of like major, change in the direction of, [00:22:00] prosecution in the United States.

Simon: Right. And I actually really like the Rikers and NYPD examples too. Those are good New York-specific things to keep in mind the next time you see one of those stories. And okay, as the final question for you before we let you go, towards the end of the book, you offer a guide for posing questions to what you call “punishment, bureaucrats, and politicians.” Can you give our listeners just a flavor of what they should be asking people in power?

Alec: The last chapter of the book has detailed questions for people of all backgrounds to ask in different contexts, you know, questions that journalists can ask, questions that city council and county council people can ask, questions that ordinary people can ask of their elected officials, etc., etc.

So, I encourage people to take a look at Chapter 16, where I really try to give people the tools to engage in these things for themselves. But I think in general we want to be asking what exactly are these budgets [00:23:00] going toward? We need much more transparency in how all of this money is being spent, what exactly is happening from an accountability perspective, and then, another sort of, I think really important component to the accountability discussion is what is the basis from an evidentiary perspective of these policies that you’re rolling out. So, go policy by policy. Why do you think this is good? What are the effects it’s having? What are the benefits? What are the costs? What are the documents where you weigh these things? Basically, what you’ll find, you know, having done this in a lot of different cities, is most of the policies that are being portrayed to the public as public safety policies have absolutely no connection to reality. There’s no connection to safety.

Nobody has even done even a minimal cost-benefit analysis. Nobody actually even thinks they’re a good idea. They’re not being done because anybody thinks that they’re gonna do any good. And so, I try to walk people through sets of questions that can get at and make these [00:24:00] discussions in public much more substantive than they are in typical news analysis.

Simon: And with that the book is Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News. As folks can tell, there’s a lot in this book. And we only scratch the surface, so, I, urge anyone who’s at all curious to pick it up. And Alec, thank you so much for coming on Rights This Way.

Alec: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. [00:25:00] 

Simon: Thank you for listening. You can find out more about everything we talked about today by visiting NYCLU.org. And you can follow us at @NYCLU on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. If you have questions or comments about Rights This Way, you can email us at podcast@nyclu.org. Until next time, I’m Simon McCormack. Thank you for fighting for a fair New York.