Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

by Alec Karakatsanis

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620978535
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	04/15/2025
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

A former public defender, Alec Karakatsanis is the founder of the Civil Rights Corps, an organization designed to advocate for racial justice and bring systemic civil rights cases on behalf of impoverished people. He was named the 2016 Trial Lawyer of the Year by Public Justice and was awarded the Stephen B. Bright Award for contributions to indigent defense in the South by Gideon’s Promise. The author of Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System (The New Press), he lives in Washington, DC.

Editorial Reviews

★ 02/24/2025

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. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Copaganda:

“An instructive, often enraging look at how elite publications mounted a sustained defense of the status quo after the police murder of George Floyd touched off the largest political mass movement in U.S. history.”
—The New Republic

“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. . . . Readers will be aghast.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"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

 

"Alec Karakatsanis is a gifted civil rights lawyer and a fearless guide to the urgent project of calling out the many failures of modern coverage of crime and justice. Only by really understanding those failures—why, for instance, news outlets tend to ignore ubiquitous crimes like wage theft but spill endless ink on certain street crimes—can we hope to heal our communities."
—Sarah Stillman, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and staff writer, The New Yorker

 

"Karakatsanis cuts to the heart of the rancid politics of crime, and the ways in which journalists and academics reproduce inequality and immiseration by legitimating America’s massive punishment bureaucracy. Copaganda is a masterful analysis, a call to action, and a blueprint for change."
—Alex S. Vitale, author of The End of Policing

 

From the Publisher