Copaganda Is Everywhere
Pop Culture and Journalists Have Bought In
Former public defender Alec Karakatsanis just authored a new book entitled Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News. I just ordered a copy, and while I can’t give my thoughts on the book itself, the topic is relevant to an upcoming post I’ve been writing about the series Dexter and how it is full of copaganda. In a Teen Vogue article from May 8th, Karakatsanis excerpts his book and lists many examples across the decades of the news contributing to the rise in mass incarceration.
I watched as the police and the news media distorted how we think about our collective safety. Copaganda makes us afraid of the most powerless people, helps us ignore far greater harms committed by people with money and power, and always pushes on us the idea that our fears can be solved by more money for police, prosecution, and prisons. Based on the evidence, this idea of more investment in the punishment bureaucracy making us safer is like climate science denial.
This excerpt is adapted from an important part of the book on how by selectively choosing which stories to tell, and then telling those stories in high volume, the news can induce people into fear-based panics that have no connection to what is happening in the world. It's how public polling can show people thinking crime is up when it is down year after year, and how so many well-meaning people are led to falsely believe that marginalized people themselves want more money on surveillance and punishment as the primary solutions to make their lives better.
He lists some of the moral panics fomented by the news from “crack babies” to the more recent shoplifting scare and how the public impressions that journalists create lead to increased funding for prisons and policing, despite the evidence that points to other underlying causes of crime.
In each case, minor tweaks in bureaucratic policy or marginal reforms that could not, as a matter of empirical reality, have a significant impact on society-wide violence are vehemently debated. The evidence of the root causes of interpersonal harm—like that marshaled by the Kerner Commission, which studied U.S. crime in 1968 and recommended massive social investment to reduce inequality—is ignored.
And the cycle continues: moral panic is followed by calls for more police surveillance, militarization, higher budgets for prosecutors and prisons, and harsher sentencing. Because none of these things affect violence too much, the problems continue.
His article is worth reading in full, and I’m excited to get the book and write my thoughts in a future blog post. For now, I want to give one example of the news and politicians using copaganda to promote an anti-science agenda of harsher punishment for youth and then I’ll dedicate my next two posts to how TV shows like Dexter promote copaganda. Fictional works, combined with more trusted journalism creates an environment where copaganda is as ubiquitous as the air that we breathe, making the conclusion that policing and prisons prevent crime seem natural and unquestionable. As noted in this article from Monthly Review:
Matthew Alford and Tom Secker have documented that the Department of Defense has been involved in supporting—with complete and absolute censorship rights—a minimum of 814 movies, with the CIA clocking in at a minimum of 37 and the FBI 22.15 Regarding TV shows, some of which have been very long running, the Department of Defense totals 1,133, the CIA 22, and the FBI 10.
Maryland Copaganda
The following is an excerpt from a post I wrote in November of 2023, and though the state of Maryland and the city of Baltimore have made great progress in reducing crime and creating safer neighborhoods through diversion programs and violence intervention programs, republican lawmakers (and some democrats) continue to insist that there is a need for more policing, harsher sentences, and more incarceration.
So let’s take a look at youth crime in Maryland. The Maryland Department of Juvenile Services (DJS) recently released a research brief entitled Putting Youth Crime in Maryland in Context. Across the state, but especially in Baltimore, local news stations have been regularly reporting on youth crime. According to MYJC’s tracking, over a roughly 4 month period this year, Fox in Baltimore reported on youth crime more than once a day, compared to the second highest which was a local Baltimore station reporting about once every four days. In my last post I mentioned Alec Karakatsanis’ writing about how news can create false perceptions of crime without ever technically lying, which is exactly what Fox is doing. By choosing to run stories every single day about youth crime, they are creating an impression that there is a “crime wave”. And now some state leaders have been calling for rollbacks of moderate reforms to the youth justice system and citing the public perception of rising youth crime as their reasoning. One such reform is the Child Interrogation Protection Act, which basically extends basic human rights to youth to help protect them from unsupervised interrogation (without a lawyer or a parent) in which they may give a false confession. Rolling back these reforms would lead to fewer protections of young people’s rights in the criminal justice system, and higher levels of incarceration (and racially disparate incarceration).
The public perception isn’t completely off, but a closer look at the data reveals that many of the broader trends are positive, and we should be careful in pushing for more punitive policies and more policing/incarceration of youth. Some highlights from the September 2023 DJS report linked above:
Juvenile crime represents a relatively small portion of all crime in Maryland. In 2021, adults represented 93% of homicide arrests. There is a noted increase in youth crime over the past two years; but today, most categories of youth crime - including violent youth crime - are below pre-pandemic levels and have been declining for more than a decade.
The narrow focus of local media outlets on the recent increase in youth crime ignores the context of all-time low crime rates during the pandemic and the broader view that youth crime is still lower than it was pre-pandemic.
Incarceration - while one important tool for accountability - is not the only or the most effective course in addressing juvenile crime. Recent declines in juvenile crime have occurred at a time when leaders in the justice system have made the choice to prioritize community-based rehabilitation over incarceration.
These same problems I described in 2023 have continued, according to a December 2024 report from The Sentencing Project. As they note:
A detailed analysis of news coverage at six media outlets in the Baltimore area during the first half of 2024 finds that they have been providing their audiences with skewed and misleading information about youth crime. Problematic coverage has been more frequent at the four local TV news stations analyzed than the two newspapers reviewed and especially prevalent on one local station, WBFF Fox45.
The continue on to highlight the inaccuracies of local reporting, including
Disproportionate focus on crimes committed by youth. All six local media outlets in Baltimore, but especially TV news stations (and particularly Fox45), highlighted crimes by young people far out of proportion with their arrest rates.
Misleading representation of youth crime trends. Whereas the available data on youth offending rates in Baltimore show a mix of trends, most of them favorable, all six local media outlets repeatedly asserted a recent spike in youth crime and violence.
It seems that this untruthful reporting may have been intended to influence the legislative session where lawmakers were debating rollbacks to youth justice reforms and other harsh measures.
The tone of the Fox45 coverage, and to a lesser extent the coverage at other news outlets, fostered an atmosphere of panic around youth crime during Maryland’s 2024 legislative session.6 The problematic media coverage in Baltimore (the state’s largest city and home to the State Senate President and the Speaker of the House of Delegates) likely contributed to a bipartisan rush to toughen juvenile justice policies that is unsupported by the evidence of what actually works to reduce youth offending and maintain community safety.
Given all the evidence we have around youth crime and the long-term downward trends, the fear-mongering from politicians is especially egregious. Following the same strategy as some news outlets, so-called “tough on crime” politicians highlight specific anecdotes of crimes committed and argue that these crimes are indicative of a broader trend (absolutely not true) and are caused by lenient punishments (evidence says otherwise). In reality, a truly tough on crime politician would support investments in education, expanded summer programming for youth, and expanded diversion and interventions that support and mentor youth who have committed a crime. Such programs recognize that no one is defined by the worst thing they have done and everyone has the capacity to change, especially youth whose brains are still developing and whose critical thinking capacities and impulse control are not yet fully formed. With proper guidance, youth can move toward a more positive path and a fulfilling life for them and their community. But with incarceration they are often taken away from sources of support and forced to form even worse habits to cope with the harshness of the detention environment.
On top of all this, inequality, homelessness, and hunger are all contributing factors to crime that a tough on crime politician should want to tackle. But as we know, being “tough on crime” really means punishing the poor through both policing and reductions of public programs and sources of support.
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