Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - How the Media Tricks You Into Loving the Police

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

If you’ve ever wondered why news media obsesses over shoplifting but ignores wage theft, or why media outlets report a "shortage" of prison guards without questioning why we imprison so many people, you've probably encountered copaganda. In this episode, award-winning civil rights lawyer and author Alec Karakatsanis joins me to discuss his phenomenal new book, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, and to break down all the ways that our news ecosystem is polluted with pro-police PR. We talk about how copaganda shapes literally every form of media in the U.S. and warps our perceptions of safety and justice. Alec reveals how these fear-driven narratives are fueling the rise of authoritarian policies, mass incarceration, and deepening inequality. Subscribe to my newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.usermag.co⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to my YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@TaylorLorenz⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow me on IG: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow me on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenzFollow me on Bluesky: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bsky.app/profile/taylorlorenz.bsky.social⁠⁠⁠⁠ 

Only 4% all police time goes to what the police call violent crime. And if most people understood where their money was actually going with police, they would be horrified. Pro police propaganda is everywhere. From local news to TikTok videos, the police have built a massive, sprawling media machine that warps the public's view on crime and is backed by billions of dollars in funding. Al-Cara Katsanas is an investigative reporter and his new book,

Coppaganda, dives deep into how pro-police message has infiltrated our media landscape so thoroughly, we don't even realize we're absorbing it. Today, he joins me to talk about what copaganda looks like, how it became so pervasive, and how it's reshaping the way we see crime, justice, and even each other. Alec, welcome to power user. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to have you here because I am such a fan of everything you do and write, but especially your Twitter account, I feel like I retweet everything that you post

because you're constantly calling out these really bad media narratives around the police. So your new book is called Copaganda. Can you start by just telling everyone what is Copaganda? Copaganda to me is a special kind of propaganda that serves the interests of what I call the punishment bureaucracy. So police, prosecutors, prisons, and the multi-billion dollar industries that are sort of parasitic on those bureaucracies. For me, copaganda has really three main functions. So first, it narrows our conception of threat and safety. So it gets us afraid of some things, but kind of ignoring other threats to our safety that are actually more serious. So it constantly has us afraid of poor people, people of color, particularly black people, immigrants, strangers.

But then it ignores huge swaths of harm that are typically committed by people in power and rich people. Wage theft, which is five times all property crime combined, tax evasion, which is like 60 times all property crime combined. Air pollution, much of which is criminal, right, as well, violates criminal laws. It results in the death of about 100,000 people in this country every single year. So that's about five times all homicide combined. Clean Water Act violations and water pollution, which kills children. It rates far exceeding other forms of crime. There's about 100,000 of those every single year, almost never talked about on nightly news, right?

So Coppina narrows our conception of safety. The second thing is, like, it constantly makes us. afraid of those things, right? So it understands that we're going to support more repressive and authoritarian stuff if we're afraid. If you look at the public polling over the last 25 years, every single year people think crime is rising. And yet almost every single year over that period, crime is actually going down. And then the final thing it does, the third and probably most important function of copaganda is it tells us that the solution to all of our fears is more investment in police prosecution and prison. And it's that third part, which I think is almost

most important because it's constantly peddling on us something that is akin to climate science denial, this idea that instead of addressing the root causes of harm and violence, like inequality and poverty and lack of access to housing, lack of access to health care and early childhood education and toxic masculinity and isolation and lack of human connection, like all the things that the evidence shows actually are the reason people harm each other. It has us focusing on like building more prisons and hiring more cops and more prosecutors and judges and probation officers and parole officers and prison guards. It's really insidious. Yeah, I feel like it's so insidious. And once you see it, you see it everywhere. I mean, you've completely transformed the way

that I personally read the news and I work in media, but I can't look at local news anymore, even read something like The New York Times and not just see this like pro-police authoritarian framing, honestly, on a lot of stories. For people that might not be able to picture what copaganda that looks like in the wild. I mean, I think we've all seen the local news segments about the police have this amazing new drone. Like that seems very overt. But what does a lot of this stuff and this narrative building look like out in the media environment that people might not realize it's copaganda? Yeah. So I try to walk people through in the book a bunch of different kinds of copaganda that some of which you may not even really notice. And I think the most important thing

is like not even the words that are used or the phrases or the sources, but actually like the first question is like, what is a news story? So the decision by an editor or a producer or a reporter that one thing is news and another thing is not news, it's typically considered news if somebody steals from Walgreens, but it's not considered news if a landlord doesn't install a smoke detector and a family dies like they did yesterday in New York City. For example, a few years ago, there was a viral video of a theft in Walgreens. And that one video in San Francisco led to 300, in nine national news articles, just that one incident. At the same time, none of those news outlets saw fit to report as news the wage theft cases against Walgreens, which were far more substantial.

So this idea of all the millions of things that editors and producers and reporters could tell us about, how are they selecting these seven or eight or nine or ten or eleven that appear on the local news broadcast or on the pages of the New York Times? That's a huge source of copaganda, It turns out that the decisions that are being made are not kind of random. They follow patterns. And that leads to another thing, which is not just like what is covered and what is ignored, but the volume of news coverage. So I mentioned a moment ago, I think the most important but hidden aspect of copaganda

is how many stories there are about certain things. So I did a lot of civil rights work over the last few years about the injustice of the criminalization of poverty and debtors prisons and money bail. and I would be talking to editors at the New York Times or NBC News or CBS or whatever. And they would say to me, well, you know, that's very interesting and very troubling that judges are violating people's rights in millions of cases a year and there's millions of children separated from their families illegally. And it's actually making crime worse and it's like a horrible story.

But, you know, this other outlet like the New Yorker already did a story on that like a month ago. So, you know, it's not news. That's not how they think about like an armed robbery. Nobody says that like, oh, you know, the local news in Cleveland, the car. covered like an armed robbery there. So we in Phoenix can't cover like a different armed robbery. But every single day, people are being illegally jailed because their families can't pay cash bail in every single county in the country pretty much, right? At least several thousand counties. Some counties we've actually been successful in ending that practice. But the idea that one of those

is a specialty news story to be covered by like an investigative reporter. And another is an urgent news story that leads the local news broadcast every single night. that generates this sense of kind of urgency, like local news and even national news are sending us push alerts to our phone. Like, you know, I did this local TV show in L.A. a couple of years ago, and the news anchor was going on and on

about this theft of a Rolex in Beverly Hills. And he was trying to say to me, he's like, well, this is the most affluent area of the city. And like, of course we have to cover it when someone is walking on the street and their Rolex is taken. And I said, well, you're choosing not to cover lots of other crime.

And how are you making a decision? And how was it that every single night you're covering something like that, but you're never really covering all the water pollution violations in L.A. or the air pollution crimes that people are committing. So those are some of the issues, but then it gets a lot deeper, right? Like who is quoted in these stories? And what are you told about their background that might help you understand and place into context the things they're saying to you? And what words and phrases are used that actually shape your thinking that actually embed within them certain really anti-evidence and kind of problematic assumptions. I could go on and on,

but I think those are some examples. What are some of these words and phrases that you see repeated so often in these articles and news pieces? I think that there's a lot of different words and phrases that we might not even think about as problematic, but that in my opinion are really troubling. So for example, when they're talking about a reformer or someone who's got a more progressive view on the punishment system, you'll often hear the news use words like major or overhaul or sweeping. And those are actually like not objective terms, right? Those are characterizations that the news is making. And what often happens is really minor stuff that barely changes the way that this massive

profitable punishment bureaucracy is functioning are characterized in like the New York Times as like a sweeping overhaul. And that's really problematic because it conditions us. us to accept really minor tweaks when what we need is actually pretty significant transformation, or at least if you don't agree with that, you at least have to understand that it's an ideological decision to portray stuff that doesn't actually change the way the system is functioning hardly at all as like a major reform, because then when some politician comes down and says, well, actually, I want much bigger changes.

They are now seen as kind of outside the bounds, beyond the pale, because there are going way beyond even this prior major overhaul, you know? When did this whole copaganda movement start? I mean, I know it's not like a cohesive top-down effort necessarily, although we can get into some of the active efforts to shape narratives. But when did this really become pervasive in the mainstream media, this framing? I think it's been around as long as I've consumed the news. It's just I personally wasn't paying that much attention to it. I personally started paying attention really, really closely after the 2020 uprisings. I think that I think. I think, you're think there had been prior to that after Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow and all these years

of so-called criminal justice reform, there was this consensus that like the U.S. had gone way too far, right? I mean, we put people in jail and prison cells at five times our own historical average in like five to ten times other comparable countries. Even liberal states in the, in the U.S. are caging people at rates like way beyond what these other countries that people are think of as authoritarian are, right? So like people had sort of understood that we'd gone way too far. But then in 2020, I think there was this uprising that really threatened the powers that be. And I think the backlash that we've seen since 2020 has been breathtaking. And so I don't want to say that Coppagenda didn't exist before, but for me and my work, I started to pay much more

close attention to it. And it certainly felt to me, at least subjectively, like there was a wave of copaganda that was, if not new, it felt a little bit different to me. I totally agree. I mean, obviously, copaganda has always been pervasive, even back through, I think, the civil rights movement and the narratives around that and crime in the 80s and the way that different people, as you mentioned, are framed as criminals. But there definitely was a marked shift. I mean, I was working at the New York Times during that era. And these are some of my friends who I adore, you know, that write some of these news articles, but honestly, it was a lot of, I thought, really dangerously poor framing. And I think a lot of it also came down from above and the editors and what the editors wanted in the way the

editors wanted things framed. I mean, it was very obvious that certain editors wanted certain stories told, right, about like the protests in Seattle. I remember that and Portland. And journalists that did try to add a little nuance, just their stories were not going to be featured very heavily. They weren't going to get the big assignments. And so I guess even just seeing firsthand what that era was like from the inside of a major newsroom was so revealing to me. I think that's when I started maybe following your work. The reaction to the Black Lives Matter uprising stuff was so strong. How did that ultimately play out in the media? Like, how did you see coppaganda suddenly manifesting? It's everywhere. It's so pervasive. I mean, it manifested in panic after panic after

panic over different kinds. So first, there was a panic over murder. And then when it turned out that like murders actually started to go down, there's a panic over carjacking. And there's a panic over carjacking and then carjacking like actually those statistics like weren't like sort of filling the narrative then there was a panic over retail theft and then there were all these subsidiary panics and so there was this sort of wave after wave there was a lot of stuff about immigrants and homeless people and there was even a whole short news cycle obsessed over train theft you know theft from trains oh yeah you remember that in los angeles yes and Gavin newsome's out on the train tracks you know talking about how we need more police well so much of it too feels

driven by virality and viral videos. And I'm curious what role the internet is playing in copaganda as well. I mean, obviously, mainstream media is a major driver of a lot of this stuff and continues to really lead the way. But I moved to California a couple years ago. And I'm just shocked at the way it's portrayed constantly. I mean, especially cities like San Francisco and L.A., which have a lot of unhoused people. But you see these like viral videos, right, where it's like, oh, my God, here's an unhoused

person allegedly stealing something from a Walgreens. this is why we need to give the police $5 billion. So I guess how do you think the media leverage the internet or how did the internet leverage media? And what was the interplay between the two with the rise of these viral videos and this viral sort of crime content? There's one really important thing to say about this,

in my opinion, which is that the most dangerous way of accomplishing real brainwashing and real propaganda is the selective curation of true anecdote. So that's what makes these viral videos. dangerous, right? So, you know, if you asked me to, like, tell you about LeBron James or Michael Jordan or Steph Curry or something, right? And I could make you a video montage of every single missed shot in their whole career. It would be hours long for each of them, just brick after brick after brick. I could convince you that the three of them were bad shooters and terrible

basketball players. Every single one of those video snippets would be real. It would be true. It would be like the video of that theft from Walgreens. But when you combine them all together, you create a false impression using true facts. And that's what viral videos do, right, about crime, especially when you combine them with lots of other viral videos, right? So you could have a situation in the United States where shoplifting was actually down. But by the selective curation of a few videos, you could make everybody feel really scared about going to the store

and feel like shoplifting is up. And then politicians like Gavin Newsom in California, Kathy Hochel in New York. A lot of this, by the way, is led by Democrats. they would start investing hundreds of millions more dollars in police and prosecution for retail theft, passing new laws to criminalize theft more like California did. And all of that is based on these viral moments that are really actually just like selectively curating a snippet of the world in a way that's very misleading. What is the goal here?

You're talking about the editorial choices that are being made. You're talking about the way the internet rewards, this pro-police content and the carcoral state. Is this an orchestrated, concerted effort? What is the goal of pushing all of this pro-police content? I think it can be misleading sometimes to try to feel like we have to have, like, one goal. I think there's so many different players in this, and each of them have their own goals and their own incentives. You know, so for example, there's the police. There's a multi-billion dollar police public relations industry.

Their goals are actually somewhat different from the corporate news outlets, which we can get to in a minute. And their goal, the corporate news outlets are somewhat different from the frontline journalists, right? And the different people in those institutions have different incentives and different goals. And so I think it's important to understand that it's not like this one. It's not like one nefarious deep state actor is behind this. And I feel like this is actually the sad reality for so much bad stuff in the world. It's actually just sort of this like soup of aligned incentives or competing incentives. Take Los Angeles, for example, where you are, the L.A. Sheriff alone has, as a

a few years ago, 42 full-time employees doing public relations. Okay? That's insane. Yeah. Wait a second. 42 people doing PR. The LAPD, so not the sheriff, but also the LAPD, has another 27. There's also dozens more police forces in the L.A. County area. So just, but just the top two police forces between them, as of a few years ago, had 67 PR officials. If you go to Chicago, on the day that police killed LeQuan McDonald over a decade ago, they had four. full-time public relations officials.

Today, as you and I were talking, they have over 50. I actually was asked to testify by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors a few years ago because they actually were trying to figure out what is our police department spending all this money on? And they couldn't get answers from the police department. And they gave me a bunch of documents and files. For my testimony, we looked at this stuff.

And San Francisco Police Department had a full-time videographer whose job was to make these beautiful, videos for the cops. And it turned out that year they were demanding funds for a second full-time videographer just to make these sort of glorification videos of the police. And then they have all these social media specialists. And then they have outside PR firm consultants who they pay to do all this. So there's a- Wait, the police have their own social media specialists. Yes. The police have their own social media folks. Not only are they surveilling and watching our social media, but they're actually like on there doing their own commenting and posting and things like that.

Now that I think about it, a lot of how I get statements from the police is through social media. So I guess they do have social media managers. And it seems like the entire police infrastructure, as you mentioned, has really recognized the power of controlling the narrative and really controlling online influence, which as I argue in my book is really like the most powerful form of currency that you can have today. Why is the traditional media so bought into it? I mean, I understand from the police perspective why they want to control the narrative. They want everything in their interests. But why do so many journalists that work within the mainstream media? And I mean, I've worked at these places and I see the stories as well.

Like, why do you think so many of them do ultimately end up pushing these pro-police narratives and copaganda? I feel like I'm obliged to say that it's not all journalists. And I relied on so many amazing journalists for this book. I couldn't have done this book without hundreds of journalists sending me stuff. Often they, you know, be someone at the New York Times sending me say, hey, can you see what my colleague just did? Can you help me understand this or help me comment on it? I want to put it in our internal Slack chain channel. Can you like comment on it?

So I think what's going on is there are political divides in these newsrooms and these news outlets like any other place. And I think there are really different approaches at different news outlets as well. So I would say for most of the local news reporters I've talked to, there's been a real divestment from local journalism. So much so that, you know, I had this news anchor contact me. from like a mid-market Midwest town. And he said, look, I've been like reading your analysis, and we agree at my station. We feel like we're responsible for all this fear-mongering.

We're, like, making people afraid. We don't want to do this kind of thing, but you have to understand. We have to fill, like, 24 minutes of news at 6, 6.30, 7, 10, 10, 30, 11, and back in the morning. And, like, the police make it so easy for us. They send us not only lists of all the people

they've arrested with all the reports, but they send us video. They send us charts and graphs. They send us quotes. People to interview. And the teachers unions don't have the capacity to do that. The nurses and the doctors who are seeing all this stuff that's so much more worth reporting on. We don't have currently the resources to have a reporter stationed at the courthouse to look at what the landlords are doing,

to look at the workplace safety violations and child labor violates, all the other things. The people that inspect our water for toxins and our soil for lead, don't have the PR apparatus that the police do. So we started an organization of the Center for Just Journalism whose job is to actually work with local journalists to connect them with all kinds of other people in their community who have so many important stories to tell, whether it's nurses or teachers or public defenders or civil rights lawyers or directly impacted people or people who run daycares, whatever it is. I think that's amazing that you're doing that work, but it's inherently impossible to scale at the level that the police are operating at. Like, as you mentioned,

I think, especially when you're a journalist, you have to fill that airtime, you're a local news reporter, but even when you're not, even when you're a national news reporter, right? You're forced to kind of turn things around really quickly. You're incentivized to match the reporting of other outlets. And as you said, I mean, if something is packaged very easily by a comms person that innately understands virality, it's hard to argue to a boss that you shouldn't just take that story. We're not going to get paid billions of dollars like the police to do this. But we have so many resources in our own communities. We can treat this like an organizing and a mutual aid project.

So, for example, when my mom retired, she joined the local court watch program in Pittsburgh. And they just went and watched court and wrote reports and report on this stuff. And their stuff just started getting into the news because they were essentially acting like local community journalists. There's people doing that all over the country. there's teachers and student groups, there's retired people, there's lawyers, public defenders getting together and reporting on this stuff and developing relationships. But they don't have any of the funding that the police have, and I think that that's what's really hard, right? Is that they're up against this massive, well-funded comms machine. And it's amazing to have those grassroots efforts, but it still

doesn't help to dismantle this huge machine. And I guess I'm wondering, like, how is it so well-funded? A big problem is that most people, and in fact, most local politicians simply do not understand their police budget. The police have been very effective at essentially concealing what they spend money on. And if most people understood where their money was actually going with police, they would be horrified. Only 4% all police time goes to what the police call violent crime. 4%. 96% of the money they're spending is not. not going to what everyone seems to think is the most important reason for police.

Now, also, it just so happens. I don't think that because the police are incredibly poor at reducing and solving violent crime. But that's a whole other story. But even on their own story of the most important things they're supposed to be doing, it's only 4% of their time. So what is the money being spent on? The money for police departments is being wasted on an extraordinary array of stuff. Huge expenditures on overtime, totally needless,

surveillance equipment and IT and military technology, boondoggles on training. And then you've got just egregious expenditures on things like the war on drugs, on things like policing homeless people. I guess things like building cop city in Atlanta. Yeah. I think another thing that is not very widely understood is that there are massive sick leave and other forms of fraud that the police engage in. So, you know, there was a scandal that broke a few years ago that didn't get nearly enough attention

about how there were several thousand of the guards on Rikers were, like, out sick at any given time. Well, couldn't they actually be sick? So the investigators determined that there was this huge fraud. Of the order of, you know, massive amounts of federal crimes. Because each example of this is like wire fraud, mail fraud often, not to mention state law crimes and theft of services and whatever else it might be. this could have been portrayed in the media as a crime wave by people who are supposed to be like enforcing the law. Instead, it was just swept under the rug. Adams got rid of the people who were investigating this and made these findings.

And really no consequences have yet been visited on any of these people. When we look at the state of the police now, I mean, obviously the Republicans and Trump have always been like back the blue, the thin blue line and all that. But it seems like in the past few years, especially since 2020, we've seen this movement from the Democrats where the Democrats are increasingly authoritarian. and they're boosting the police. Like, they're the ones that are funding. I mean, you mentioned Eric Adams, like Gavin Newsom, like these, Kathy Hockel, like all these politicians are aggressively pro-police and arguing that we need more funding for police

and constantly showering billions of dollars on these police departments. Where did that shift come from? And what do you feel like copaganda looks like from the left versus the right? That's such an important question for me, because I think my work and this book, Copaganda, are really about the Democrats. and liberals and these institutions that portray themselves as liberal and progressive. So like a lot of these news outlets, I pay particular attention to professors and universities

and the role that they play in validating and laundering what otherwise would be seen as like far right climate science denial level nonsense into like acceptable mainstream consensus opinion on these issues. And so I don't think it's necessarily been a shift. I think for as long as I've been alive, the Democrats have been a party of mass incarceration. You know, there's the 94 crime bill, even, you know, with Clinton and Biden. And mass incarceration was very, very much a democratic policy. If you look at who is in control of the punishment bureaucracy in thousands of cities and counties across this country and in many states, it's the Democratic Party. So I think what I became obsessed with over the last few years is understanding these institutions that

portray themselves as liberal and progressive, what role are they playing in actually validating and normalizing and making more popular the mythologies and assumptions and attitudes of the far right? And that to me is essential because if it were only the right-wing police unions and Trump and other Republicans saying some of this stuff, I think a lot of lot of kind of low information, ordinary, liberal-type people wouldn't go along with it. But because there's so many validators from worlds that they're told that they can trust saying a lot of these same things in language that is designed to be a little more palatable to them, almost the exact same message is being conveyed on these issues in the New York Times and in the New York Post,

or the New York Times and Fox News, or NBC News and Fox News. But the language and the propaganda tactics are slightly different, but the same underlying outcome and effect. So much of this reminds me of the tech landscape, actually, where you see in the past four or five years as well, the Democrats have gone aggressively towards censorship and dismantling free speech and civil liberties, I guess, all over the place,

but especially in online spaces, where you see now right-wing reactionary rhetoric on tech claiming that social media is destroying kids' mental health or all these other things that there's actually absolutely no evidence for and actually quite a bit of evidence against is repeated. Like this moral panic about tech and online safety, quote unquote, is like you said, it's a fundamentally right-wing reactionary ideology, but it is laundered through these sort of well-meaning liberal spaces. When you say that the language looks a little bit different or their tactics are a little bit different, can you give

people examples? Like, I mean, how do you know if you are a regular New York Times reader or you're reading one of these seemingly reputable liberal outlets? How can you recognize copaganda? You might see in the New York Post or Fox News a story about how we need police body cameras to capture the violent immigrant gang member criminals. And we need to get them on videos so we can punish them. That is coming from a huge push by a multi-billion dollar industry to expand surveillance technology in the United States. These are the same industries, by the way, who are profiting off of and selling the same technology and similar technologies in authoritarian governments all over the world. So in much of the

world, they use some of the same talking points that you might see in Fox News and the New York Post. They don't need to dress things up for well-intentioned, well-meaning liberals. But in the New York Times, you might see a similar push toward body cameras led by Democrats, but all framed as accountability and transparency. Even though there is an overwhelming scientific consensus. Now, even the federal government admits that there is no evidence that body cameras make police less violent or more accountable. But instead, you've got all of this propaganda, and I looked at every article on body cameras I could find over a period of nine years prior to the book. And I examined it, and not a single article told the actual story of how police prosecutors and the surveillance

industry wanted body cameras and they couldn't get the billions of dollars in funding by using the right wing talking points, by using the police talking points. So what did they do? In the wake of Michael Brown's killing in Ferguson, Obama and the Democrats came in and the police industry convinced them to frame body cameras as a reform for accountability and transparency. Then body camera sales skyrocketed. And now the police could have the funding that they always craved to get a surveillance camera

that's mobile that looks outward, away from the police officer in every city in the country on almost every cop. And now there are these multi-billion dollar contracts for data storage and facial recognition and voice recognition. Now you can have officers going to a protest in any

city in the country and just scanning the crowd like this. And now they know everybody who's there and who knows who and who's with who. That was something that if you had framed it, like the right wing was framing it, like we need to track everyone, we need to know who all the protesters are,

we needed to punish all the criminals. A lot of the public would have been like, oh, that sounds kind of Orwellian. But because the New York Times and the Democrats framed it as a reform for accountability and transparency, even though everybody knew that body cameras were hardly ever

going to be used to prosecute a police officer for violence, and the data now backs that up, instead they are used every single day. in courtroom after courtroom after courtroom all over this country to prosecute the poorest people in our society. Can you give me any other examples of what copaganda looks like? Like more stories that you've seen where this fundamentally reactionary right-wing agenda was pushed successfully by Democrats through copaganda. Another really important one is this myth that pervades liberal news outlets that a good faith response to like the war on drugs or homelessness is more police.

prosecution in prisons. There is a scientific consensus that you can't reduce drug use and drug overdose through punishment. We've spent trillions of dollars in the war on drugs. We've caged tens of millions of people, separated millions of children from their families, we've chemically sprayed and firebombed much of Latin America, we've surveilled billions of people. We've killed hundreds of thousands of people in the war on drugs, and yet overdose deaths are at all-time highs. And the idea that we need more police for that supposed problem is portrayed as such a consensus in the mainstream news that when you see these stories in the Associated Press or the New York Times or the San Francisco Chronicle, they'll say things like police and legislators are advocating harsher

punishments for fentanyl in an effort to reduce drug use. That is just total nonsense. Everybody understands that it's not going to do that. And those people know that it's not going to do that. It's not an effort to do that. There's other interests at play. There's other reasons they're doing it. And the same is true of homelessness. The idea that the major driver of homelessness is not enough prosecution of people for public camping is ludicrous in a world where people can't afford to live in these cities. Now that you're saying it, you start to see these narratives all over. And you start to see this messaging that is the pro-police messaging all over in, as you said, even just story selection. We've talked to

so much about the news media, but you write also about these efforts in the entertainment industry. Can you talk a little bit about that? And how is copaganda seeping into not just news media, but other more entertaining forms of media as well? One of the most important types of copaganda is what I think of as fictional copaganda. So that's the copaganda that is all around us. Every single time you see a TV show about cops, there's a cop consulting on that, right? There's a whole universe of current and former police and police officials who are shaping every time you consume something that talks about policing, whether it's cops, which is obviously a reality show or law and order. I talk about in the book how the creator of law and order saw their job as helping people understand that prosecutors and cops were doing God's work. Then there's things like Spike Lee when he made his horrific film.

Black Klansman was under contract with the NYPD for marketing. So everything you consume, that's a fictional story that portrays the cop in some way, the cops have their hands in that too, probably. And they are shaping it. Yeah, I was actually thinking of this article that I read recently in the Wall Street Journal where a bunch of aspiring true crime writers can get paired with police officers through Facebook groups, actually. And the efforts that police are making to shape thrillers and crime writing from these aspiring

fiction authors and just how quickly, as you mentioned, kind of like what's happening with the news where these people are like, oh, you want to write a story about, you know, a kidnapping, I'm a real police. Let me tell you how the police investigate these things and let me tell you all the work that we do in these areas. Never mind that I highly doubt half of these local cops that are consulting with these fiction writers have ever solved any of these types of cases. But they're just getting in there and sort of like you said, getting their like claws in there pretty early and shaping these narratives.

And they have a very particular worldview about what they do. And that view is by and large, one that supports more and more and more investment in the bureaucracies of state control and surveillance and violence and fewer and fewer investments in the things that are actually the root causes of harm. And that's, if I had to pick kind of a central theme of so many of the examples in the book, it would be they always want us to focus on little tweaks to the policy. of the punishment bureaucracy, is the sentence too long or too short, or is this person out on bail when they shouldn't be, or are there 10 more cops than there should be, or 10 fewer cops? When really crime and safety are actually driven by big features of our society, like inequality and poverty and access to housing and health care and education and things like that. And that is a mythology that pervades even progressive news coverage, because even subtly,

they link police and crime together all the time when people. police are actually not that important to crime. Yeah, that's so interesting to actually think of it that way. I feel like your book does, I mean, such a good job of painting all these examples. And you've talked about all the ways that copaganda is infiltrating our media ecosystem left, right and center. And we didn't even get into like ring cameras and the citizen app and like this whole tech-based crime monitoring world that I feel like we have now. But what can people do to recognize copaganda? Like when they're out in the world. And I know you mentioned people can look at things like story selection and whatever. But how can people get a more? more accurate media environment? What should people read and consume? And are there any forms of media

that are kind of more copaganda free? I think a really important thing is like, don't consume as much daily news. It's much, much better to consume long form journalism and podcasts and documentaries and books. You can actually end up learning a lot more about the subjects than if you consume a series of short, context-free daily news articles. So one thing I recommend for people is like minimize your consumption of daily news and really take that time and read or watch or listen to things that delve into an issue in a little bit more depth. That's one recommendation. Another is develop more critical reading capacity and then share with others. We can't confront these kinds of things alone. We're much more susceptible to propaganda when we're alone and isolated. And just like

you have reading groups, you should have reading groups for stuff like the news. And you should discuss it with people and share things and share some of the tips in the book about how to critically consume the news with other people in your life. And because we together need to develop some mechanism for fortifying our collective minds against this relentless propaganda. Because it's a very hard thing to do alone. Even I myself, when I'm not around people to kind of like help me discuss these things and remind me of some of these critical points, I'm susceptible to it just like everybody else. Well, I feel like also we just believe all of this stuff about crime. I mean, even as you mentioned, just unlinking the idea of police and crime is a feat in itself.

I mean, it's almost impossible. And I think that there's people have been just bombarded and bombarded with so much stuff. Again, this just reminds me so much of tech stuff too, where people are just bombarded with these ideas that the smartphone is rotting your brain or whatever they want to believe. And it almost doesn't matter what reality is, right? It doesn't matter, as you said, that the data shows over and over again that police don't necessarily solve these violent crimes that much or whatever. you know, they're not going to help drug reduces, but it's already those beliefs are just so imbued in society. Absolutely. Overall, the thing that I'll say is don't be too hard on yourself. We're surrounded by this stuff. And our whole understanding of the world has been shaped in so many

ways by various types of propaganda. And what I tried in this book is just to help us see some of the ways in which our conception of threat and safety and fear and solutions for those things is impacted by that propaganda, but every single subject that we consume in the news is plagued by similar forms of propaganda. And I think my hope with this book, that our consumption of the news about crime and safety in a more critical way will help us identify these same kinds of patterns in other areas, too. Alec, thank you so much for chatting with me today. Thank you so much for having me. All right, that's it for the show. You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. Don't forget to subscribe to my tech and online culture news.

newsletter, usermag.co. That's usermag.com to support my work and to keep this podcast going. If you like the show, give us a rating and review on Apple, podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And don't forget that my bestselling book extremely online is now finally out on paperback. It has a brand new cover. I'm obsessed with it. You can pick it up wherever books are sold. Until then, see you next week.