Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

From a prizewinning civil rights lawyer comes a powerful warning about how the media manipulates public perception, fueling fear and inequality, while distracting us from what truly matters

“Alec Karakatsanis exposes our criminal injustice system for what it is: a bureaucracy of punishment, propped up by a biased media machine that feeds mass incarceration. After Copaganda, you’ll never read the news the same way again.” -Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

In this groundbreaking expose, essential for understanding the rising authoritarian mindset, award-winning civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis introduces the concept of “Copaganda.” He defines Copaganda as a special kind of propaganda employed by police, prosecutors, and news media that stokes fear of police-recorded crime and distorts society’s responses to it. Every day, mass media manipulates our perception of what keeps us safe and contributes to a culture fearful of poor people, strangers, immigrants, unhoused people, and people of color. The result is more and more authoritarian state repression, more inequality, and huge profits for the massive public and private punishment bureaucracy.

For readers of Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky, Copaganda documents how modern news coverage fuels insecurity against these groups and shifts our focus away from the policies that would help us improve people’s lives–things like affordable housing, adequate healthcare, early childhood education, and climate-friendly city planning.

These false narratives in turn fuel surveillance, punishment, inequality, injustice, and mass incarceration. Copaganda is often hidden in plain sight, such as:

• When your local TV station obsessively focuses on shoplifting by poor people while ignoring crimes of wage theft, tax evasion, and environmental pollution
• When you hear on your daily podcast that there is a “shortage” of prison guards rather than too many people in prison
• When your newspaper quotes an “expert” saying that more money for police and prisons is the answer to violence despite scientific evidence to the contrary

Recognized by Teen Vogue as “one of the most prominent voices” on the criminal legal system, Karakatsanis brings his sharp legal expertise, trenchant political analysis, and humorous storytelling to drastically alter the way we consume information, while offering a hopeful path forward. One towards a healed humanity–and media system–with a vested interest in public safety and equality.