Synopsis
In "Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News," civil rights lawyer and former public defender Alec Karakatsanis introduces the concept of "copaganda" as a pervasive form of propaganda deployed by police departments, prosecutors, and news outlets. This system deliberately stokes public fear of street-level crimes—especially those associated with poor, marginalized, or powerless people—while downplaying or ignoring far greater societal harms like corporate wage theft, environmental destruction, and deaths from products such as cigarettes.
Karakatsanis argues that, despite historically low crime rates in many areas and America's dramatically expanded incarceration system (five times higher per capita than in 1970), a massive punishment bureaucracy invests heavily in shaping public perception through selective storytelling, heavy reliance on police sources and public relations efforts, and framing that presents more policing, prosecution, and prisons as the primary solutions to safety concerns. The book draws parallels to works like Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent," dissecting how news is constructed—through choices about what counts as "news," whose perspectives dominate, how experts are used, and how ideology slips into reporting—ultimately distracting society from addressing root causes of harm and sustaining inequality and mass incarceration.
Blending rigorous research, personal anecdotes from his legal work, and accessible analysis, Karakatsanis urges readers to rethink what truly threatens collective well-being and what genuine safety requires, revealing how copaganda keeps the public in a vague state of fear that benefits powerful institutions over meaningful social investment.