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The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
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.
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.
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.
Book Details
- Publisher: New Press
- Publish Date: Apr 15th, 2025
- Pages: 432
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 9.06in - 6.06in - 1.42in - 1.60lb
- EAN: 9781620978535
- Categories: • Criminal Law - General• Propaganda• Public Policy - Social Policy
About the Author
Alec Karakatsanis founded the Civil Rights Corps, an organization that challenges systemic injustices in the U.S. legal system. In the last decade, the organization's work has freed hundreds of thousands of people from illegal confinement in jail cells, reunited hundreds of thousands of families, returned tens of millions of dollars to marginalized communities, and advanced inspiring alternatives to punishment as a means of preventing and addressing social harm. He was named the 2016 Trial Lawyer of the Year by Public Justice for designing and litigating landmark constitutional challenges to cash bail and modern debtors' prison practices across the United States. The author of Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System and Copaganda (both from The New Press), he lives in Washington, DC.
Praise for this book
"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