Police’s Bribery of Media to Profit from Bad Policing
Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News (New York: The New Press, April 15, 2025). Hardcover: $25.32. 432pp, 6X9”. ISBN: 978-1-620978-53-5.
*****
A “warning about how the media manipulates public perception, fueling fear and inequality, while distracting us from what truly matters.” It helps with “understanding the rising authoritarian mindset… 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… 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.”
For a book about propaganda, this blurb sounds very propagandistic. It repeats common talking-points of the left, without introducing new ideas to explain what this book will introduce that is new to this discussion.
The “Introduction” does start with a point I did not know before: “The U.S. and the Philippines are the only two countries that use for-profit cash bail companies” (1). This is followed by information that free in-person visits have been replaced with paid “phone and video call” visits to profit companies. More revelations follow, such as that a sheriff who declared he was hug-loving (and being celebrated by DNC for this) was in the process of banning in-person visits (2-3). I think the blurb of this book could have been improved by inserting some of these little-known facts to explain this book provides original content. Also interesting: there were six other “fatal Houston police shootings over a six-week period” running up to Floyd’s death that Houston’s sheriff was refusing to release to the public, probably to avoid uproars about those as well. The public tends to get more excited to video, versus the text that somebody was shot by police.
The author explains that in 2013 he received a grant from the Harvard Law School that allowed him to start a nonprofit for civil rights injustices, after he had been practicing public-defense law (7).
Though the problem I hope the rest of this book avoids is the one that “copaganda” tends to commit, as it “leaves the public in a vague state of fear” (13). The lack of specifics regarding who is propagandizing and for what and why and how would make this a horror-nonfiction. The recommendation to stop viewing “punishment as the solution” seems absurd, as without any legal punishments for crime, things can hardly improve. Yes, it would be logical to address “poverty; lack of affordable housing” and the like, but how would focusing on these other projects help decrease copaganda, or solve criminal problems?
Just as I started to have doubts, I found some more new information. “Cultural copaganda” has apparently been practiced by the CIA “starting in the 1950s, funding projects like the Iowa Writers’ Workshop or fronting literary magazines to influence modern journalism and fiction writing”. As a publisher of a couple of journals, and somebody who just tried to start a writer’s residency, I should know if the CIA is funding my rivals. They are likely to be funding science fiction magazines (which tend to publicize spy-gadgets etc.), and that’s an area I have just been trying to enter. And this would explain why I have struggled with entering the film industry as it might be monopolized by “the DEA paying Hollywood in the 1990s to insert drug war propaganda into popular television shows”, including arguing that prosecutors are performing “God’s work”, as opposed to flawed humans who occasionally make mistakes (15-6).
Based on my research into publishing (media is a type of publishing), most news/ publications must have a sponsor, or somebody who is profiting from sharing a type of press-release that is marked as editor-checked “news”. There is likely to be only a tiny percentage of books published without any sponsorship from the person whose byline, or brand is being advertised. The overwhelming use of ghostwriters, and the lack of disclosures about how books or stories are chosen for publication allows this system to continue. It started in the earliest days of print. So, this author is taking on this enormous problem as he attempts to track coverage of “shootings” that coincide with election periods. The latest US presidential election saw the loser spend around a billion. On what? On purchasing coverage in the news etc. that portrayed her side as in the right. The author notices that after a story manages to go viral, echoing stories tend to “contain… the same quotes, sources, turns of phrase, and suggestions of more surveillance” (37). This is because the publicist paid for placement in these various sources, and this payment (in ads or indirectly) is not mentioned as the reason for the reposting. If editors/writers had been researching the press release by doing original work instead of using the publicist-provided content, we would be in a very different country. Such bribery is explained as “marketing teams” at “news outlets” having impact on “editorial decisions”, as opposed to having all power over what is allowed in print (42). There is evidence offered for how this corruption works, such as that police spend millions on their propaganda units, and occasionally appoint reporters who publish “false information that” cities like “San Francisco police fed the reporter” to “fill a vacant spot on the Board of Supervisors, which controls the police budget” (65). All these problems mean that nobody who is non-corrupt, and is simply the best candidate for a given job in the media, or for public departments can be hired, as only those in on these schemes can be let in, to avoid the whole system collapsing over such misdeeds.
There are sections of this book that are too repetitive, and too vague. But there are many revelations that will help those who are trying to understand how the public is being manipulated into believing falsehoods with government funds. This book should help anybody who is researching these topics, as well as members of the public who want to understand what has been happening to them as they consume the media, or encounter policing.
Pennsylvania Literary Journal: Spring 2025 issue: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-spring-2025

Urgent and timely, Alec Karakatsanis has offered up in Copaganda a clear look at how our police state has come to be, narrowing in on the systems that have convinced us police should exist as they do and are a net positive for the communities they operate in. This is a great follow-up to The End of Policing, Locking Up Our Own, and Defund, focusing on how we got here, which I think is a great contribution.

I got this as an arc on Netgalley and it will come out in April. As someone who does anti propaganda work as part of their activism, I cannot express how important this book is. It lays out all elements carefully. Through out the book the sarcasm increases and I just liked how it makes it more personal.

This Book Has So Very Many Problems. Read It Anyway. First, let's dispense with the fact that this is a fairly well documented book, clocking in at about 26% documentation... even if Karakatsanis' sources are pretty clearly slanted one direction... which we'll get into momentarily. No matter what else is said here, everyone considering reading this text should at least appreciate that Karakatsanis clearly shows his work. :)

Because of my own work and experiences within the anti-police-brutality spaces and indeed even the projects I was working with before giving them up in favor of book blogging, I bring a lot to this particular book that not everyone will have... which gives me a fairly unique perspective on it overall.

I can tell you that even as a former Libertarian Party official and activist, and thus someone who knew a lot of people of a *very* wide range of political persuasions... I've known *few* over the years who would be to the left of Karakatsanis. Indeed, your opinion of terms like "pregnant person" and "wage theft" is likely a good barometer of how often you're going to want to defenestrate this particular text. "Wage theft" seemingly a phrase Karakatsanis is particularly fond of.

This noted, *from his perspective*, the narrative here is at least largely coherent, and even from such a far leftist perspective, he brings up a fair amount of solid points that every American *should* read and understand... even if you have to squeeze your nose so hard you'll be afraid it will turn into a diamond as you do.

The problem, and the star deduction, comes from the simple fact that very nearly every single logical problem Karakatsanis decries in others... he also largely *employs* in building his "arguments" against them.

Hell, he even manages to fall into former Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington's "perception of crime" problem - claiming over and over (and over and over and over and over...) that "statistics say" crime is down (which, as he points out, is *always true*... when you're selective with your time ranges ;) ) even as people report seeing ever more crime. As Richard Pryor famously said - "who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?".

Indeed, part of the star deduction also comes from the pervasive "no true Scotsman" problem that runs rampant through this text. No matter how far left the politician, no matter how hard the most progressive activists pushed for a particular policy - especially in California and particularly the Bay Area - Karakatsanis *insists* that the policies were never actually progressive, that it was instead the bureaucrats and the media ("controlled" by the usual leftist scapegoats) - those he deems the "punishment bureaucracy" and that the *actual* leftist policy had never been implemented.

Still, despite the rampant problems and extremist politics, there really is quite a bit here about understanding how police and media collude and conspire to hide essential information from the rest of us, so you really do need to read this book.

Ultimately, I think there is a point Karakatsanis tries to make but utterly fails to, in his attempt to appear authoritative here:

Question. Everything.

Including this book.

And I'll go so far as to say even this very review.

Read the book yourself. Write your own review of it - cuss me up one wall and down the other if you think I deserve it, if you think Karakatsanis is perfectly correct in all things and should never possibly be even looked askance at, much less questioned. Or maybe you'll agree with me to some extent or another. *My* entire point here is to get you to read the book yourself and make up your own mind about it. I guarantee you you're going to learn *something* you didn't previously know along the way.

Recommended.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the eArc in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Copaganda by Alec Karakatsanis is a powerful, thought-provoking examination of how the American public is manipulated and mislead into believing and supporting mass incarceration and an increasingly militarized police force. I learn so much from this book. Karakatsanis's prose is very easy to understand and straight to the point. The research is impeccable. Even as someone who is generally aware of the presence of copaganda, I was shocked at how widespread the propaganda is.

This book should be required reading for everyone. 10/10