Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.
In the introduction to his most recent book, Copaganda, which was published yesterday, Alec Karakatsanis describes watching incarcerated parents in Flint, Michigan, press their faces against their prison windows, straining to read messages that their children have scrawled in chalk on the sidewalk below. Over the past twenty years, he writes, many jails have eliminated free in-person visits, and phone calls are often prohibitively expensive, so families resort to writing messages on the ground—things like “love u,” and “ur not alone,” and a drawing of a birthday cake decorated with candles. Karakatsanis describes watching jail employees with hoses wash some such messages away: “The vibrant chalk drawings,” he writes, “were reduced to splotches of muted color, like an abstract expressionist’s representation of bureaucratic cruelty.”
It’s all part of what Karakatsanis calls the “punishment bureaucracy”—the system by which the American political establishment devotes immense resources to policing the violation of certain laws by certain people. Karakatsanis writes that offenses that involve wealthier perpetrators—things like wage theft and corporate negligence—are rarely addressed with the brute force and cruelty meted upon poor people. “Punishment bureaucrats have produced a structure of mass human caging that is unlike anything that any other society has ever attempted,” he told me recently. “Let alone any other society that thinks of itself as a democracy.”
In 2016, Karakatsanis, a public defender, started Civil Rights Corps, a nonprofit that litigates against prosecutor and police abuse, and that mounts challenges against privatization within the legal system. While doing this work, he became increasingly disturbed by the ways in which news coverage was shaping the American legislative agenda. He began documenting pro-police bias in prominent outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times, as well as within local newspapers and broadcast stations. Copaganda is the culmination of his research to date. In the book, he argues that journalists have been essential to the construction of a system that villainizes the poor, neglects stories about white-collar crime, and prioritizes punishment over public safety. Among the forces shaping this narrative is a jaw-droppingly robust police public-relations apparatus. (ICYMI, Alexandria Neason wrote for CJR back in 2019 about how police PR departments have often misled the press.)
Karakatsanis and I met recently in the sunny Washington, DC, office from which he runs Civil Rights Corps. We discussed the role of reporting in creating public panic, about what makes a story newsworthy, and how journalists can mitigate pro-police bias in their own work. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
YRG: Where did the idea for this book come from? Why did you decide to make the news media a primary focus?
AK: I wanted to write a book about how institutions that think of themselves as being liberal contribute to the mythologies that underlie the authoritarian turn in our society. It concerned me that punishment bureaucrats—police, prosecutors, judges, probation and parole officers, prison guards and their unions, the constellation of multibillion-dollar companies that profit off of every single stage of this system—were setting the agenda around what the problems were and who was to blame for them. I became interested in how mainstream media institutions were either ignoring or paying a lot of attention to certain kinds of issues, and what they were telling their audiences about the solutions for those problems—things like body cameras, which were pitched as a reform [despite the fact that] there’s overwhelming evidence that they don’t make police less violent or more accountable. The news was manufacturing a consensus around certain quote-unquote “reforms” that actually wouldn’t solve any of the problems that impacted the lives of my clients, but that would perpetuate and even grow the power of the punishment bureaucracy.
In the book you focus your analysis on institutions that purportedly hold progressive values, rather than on right-wing outlets like Fox News. Can you tell me about that decision?
This is part of a larger project of explaining how elite institutions—from universities to nonprofits to mainstream news outlets—perpetuate many of the most harmful, unjust, and even authoritarian aspects of our world by putting a veneer of liberal progressiveness on them. Their most dangerous function is they take well-meaning people and co-opt them to think that the actual solution is tweaking the levers of the government’s repressive institutions while maintaining their structure in all material respects. I’m so obsessed with these outlets because they are the ones that are siphoning off people in our society who would support fundamentally more egalitarian, liberatory policy.
You talk about excessive shoplifting coverage around 2021 and 2022 as an example of the problematic ways in which well-respected mainstream outlets report on public safety. What does this example reflect about the media ecosystem? What was the impact of this coverage?
Shoplifting actually wasn’t increasing, and the [coverage] created a real wave of panic. I became obsessed with the volume of news, because volume is actually how you control levels of fear and panic in our society in a way that sows the seeds of an authoritarian mindset. Once you’ve made people afraid, you can [convince] them that the solution to their fears is not investing in things that people actually need, like healthcare and education and housing, but instead in the tools of state repression. I started talking to journalists about covering issues like debtors’ prisons, people being jailed because they cannot make a payment on old tickets. This is happening hundreds of thousands of times a week in the United States, and they are totally different instances—different families being separated by each of these decisions—but I was having editors say to me, Oh, well, somebody else already covered the debtors’ prison story a few weeks ago. And that fascinated me, because no editor in these institutions was saying, Well, we covered a shoplifting from CVS last week, so it’s not worth covering this shoplifting from Walmart today. Why [is unlawful imprisonment] viewed as a story to be covered with one investigative piece but the issue of shoplifting is thought of as [many] individual stories?
A lot of people made a lot of money off [the shoplifting coverage]. Stores were able to socialize the cost of their security to public dollars. It was very, very useful in some of the midterm elections and the recall campaigns of progressive district attorneys. You could imagine if instead we all got push alerts on our phones every time the police illegally searched somebody, every time a judge illegally detained someone and separated a family, every time someone’s pet died because they were illegally put in jail because they owed money on a ticket. Our society would have a fear of different kinds of things and a different sense of what the urgent issues of our time are.
You write in the book about the ways in which the agenda of police departments and others within the “punishment bureaucracy” ends up shaping coverage. Why does this happen?
Some of it is [journalists’] failure to interrogate who their sources are and what [their] biases might be. For example, I found in my research that most news organizations don’t have a rigorous process for tracking their sources; they’re not [asking], Hey, are all the sources that brought us this collection of stories for the last six months actually people with a certain agenda? It also became really clear to me that editors and reporters had no rigorous intellectual justification for the decisions they were making concerning the volume of news on certain topics. They weren’t doing very basic things like auditing the number of stories they were covering and then asking, Does the level of attention that we’re paying to certain stories match the amount of social harm that the issue is actually causing? There are a lot of cultural and ideological norms that many journalists have been taught or have absorbed. For example, when you report as an objective fact that there’s a shortage of prison guards as opposed to too many people in prison, you’re actually taking a side in a very consequential political debate. [There’s also the fact that] a lot of local newsrooms are really resource-strapped, and they have to figure out how to fill a lot of content every day. The multibillion-dollar police public-relations industry is extremely good at feeding these reporters content. They don’t just give reporters a list of people who are arrested; they give them pictures, video, quotes, charts, graphs. They actually intervene in the newsgathering process to make the path of least resistance for coverage of certain types of crimes committed by certain kinds of people.
Can you tell me about your work trying to change the way news outlets cover crime? How have your critiques been received by journalists?
I started talking to people who train journalists, working with journalism professors and foundations. I did a talk to the New York Times editorial board. Some people were incredibly defensive and didn’t even really want to engage. I understand, emotionally; who in this busy, stressful world has time for some random person spewing their thoughts about your work? But at the same time, it’s life and death for the people that I represent: children who are unable to even hold their parents’ hands, people who are brutally sexually assaulted and physically beaten in jail, people who are lying around naked in pools of feces, blood, mucus, mold, and urine. Those people are being told that their stories are not important enough to cover. By and large, though, I was really encouraged by how many journalists engaged with me and helped improve my own analysis. There are many young reporters who didn’t sign up to work at the Washington Post or the New York Times so that they could do unhinged crime panic stories fed to them by police union sources. The book is really built from hundreds of conversations with people actually doing this work. Their insights furthered my own.
Other notable stories:
- Yesterday, the White House finally allowed a reporter from the Associated Press to attend an event, in the building’s East Room, two days after a court order went into effect banning the administration from discriminating against the agency over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” as Trump would like. Officials not only failed to restore the AP to the White House press pool, however, but formalized rules eliminating a designated daily slot for wire services altogether, effectively curbing access not only for the AP, but for its competitors Reuters and Bloomberg as well. The White House said that wire services would remain eligible for inclusion at its discretion, but as CNN’s Brian Stelter and Samantha Waldenberg report, the move looked like an attempt to continue disadvantaging the AP without breaching the court order.
- In other news about Trumpworld and the press, the Wall Street Journal assessed the “made for TV” approach of Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, and how immigration officials fear that her “desire for publicity” has “interfered with the operations of the agency she is in charge of running.” Elsewhere, Trump’s son Don Jr. and daughter-in-law Lara are becoming stakeholders in Salem, a right-wing media company with which they will partner on various projects. (Salem shares shot up on the news, Bloomberg reports.) And Politico reports on an unlikely shift in Trump’s TV viewing habits—he’s apparently been watching C-SPAN in the early hours, taking in reruns of testimony by his officials and remarks by Speaker Mike Johnson, among other things.
- The Houston Landing—a nonprofit news startup that launched two years ago to great fanfare and with significant funding—announced that it is shutting down and laying off all forty-three of its staff; CJR’s Sewell Chan reflects on the reasons for the site’s demise. In other local-news news, the Spokesman-Review, a paper in Spokane, Washington, is converting to nonprofit status, contingent on raising two million dollars from donors; it will be handed off to an existing nonprofit that is housed at Gonzaga University, according to Poynter. And a small paper in Maine published an ad purchased by a white supremacist about a book-burning event. The paper’s publisher cited free speech grounds.
- Yesterday, a court in Russia sentenced four journalists—Antonina Favorskaya, Kostantin Gabov, Sergey Karelin, and Artyom Kriger—to five and a half years in prison each after finding them guilty of working with the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation, which the Russian state deems an “extremist” organization. All four denied the charges against them, with at least one stating that he had never had any affiliation with Navalny; another said that they had done some interviews for a YouTube channel founded by Navalny associates, but that the channel wasn’t banned.
- And Liz Truss—the short-lived British prime minister, who was famously outlasted in the post by a head of lettuce—says that she is following in the footsteps of Trump and launching her own social media platform, championing free speech against a supposed woke deep state and its Soviet-style censorship. “We need a media network to be able to communicate to people, to be able to have a grassroots movement that is actually really demanding change of our leaders,” Truss said. The Guardian has more.
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
