Copaganda - by Alec Karakatsanis (Hardcover)

About the Book

"An exploration of "copaganda"-propaganda employed by police and news media"--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

In this groundbreaking expose essential for understanding rising authoritarianism, award-winning civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis introduces the concept of "Copaganda."

Copaganda is a special kind of propaganda employed by police, prosecutors, and news media to stoke fear of police-recorded crime and distort society's response to it.

What readers will discover:

How mass media manipulates our perception of what keeps us safe.
Why fear of poor people, strangers, immigrants, unhoused people, and people of color is deliberately cultivated.
The ways this fear leads to authoritarian repression, inequality, and massive profits for the punishment bureaucracy.

Why it matters:
For readers of Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky, Copaganda shows how modern news coverage fuels insecurity and distracts us from policies that would truly improve lives and make us safer-like reducing inequality, expanding housing, and investing in healthcare, early childhood education, and climate-friendly city planning.

Hidden in plain sight:

When your local TV station obsessively reports on shoplifting but ignores wage theft, tax evasion, and environmental pollution.
When podcasts talk about a "shortage" of prison guards rather than too many people in prison.
When newspapers quote "experts" calling for more money for police and prisons despite scientific evidence to the contrary.

About the author:
Recognized by Teen Vogue as "one of the most prominent voices" on issues of law and justice, Alec Karakatsanis combines sharp legal expertise, trenchant political analysis, and humorous storytelling to transform the way we consume information.

The result:
A hopeful path forward--towards a healed humanity and a media system invested in real public safety and equality.

Review Quotes

Praise for Copaganda:

"Karakatsanis provides a primer on how to read and assess news stories and opinion pieces."
-Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"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

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.