[music] I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome our guest today, Alec Karakatsanis.

He's an American civil rights lawyer and author of the book Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News.

He's also 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.

Alec, a pleasure to meet you today, to welcome you back on The Open Mind.

Thank you so much for having me.

Alec, we've heard the thesis of your book.

For years, correct me if I'm wrong, but the basic idea of, the media being a destructive, sensationalized force, that is actually not improving, the health of civil society and the public at large.

Is that your thesis in writing this, or is it something else?

I think it's important to get a little bit more in the weeds and to really understand, in particular, on these issues of public safety and authoritarianism.

What exactly is the media doing?

And so what I try to do with my book is I walk through all of the different ways and all the different stages along the process of what things become news and how those things are reported, how they distort our understanding of safety, how they make us afraid of the most marginalized and vulnerable people in our society, and how they distract us from the evidence based and obvious solutions to making our society more equal, more just, more free and more safe.

So that's helpful, you're making the narrative more nuanced and substantiating the point.

So, how precisely are you doing that?

Let's take the prime example of local news and the fact that on any given morning, afternoon or evening in whatever state or locality you live in, you're going to be exposed to, information about violent offenses, where do local news go wrong in reporting on said offenses?

They go wrong in a whole wide range of places.

But I'll just start with one obvious one, which is what I call in the book, the volume of news.

So it's not just what is news.

So the question of which, out of the million things that happened the night before, which 8 or 10 is local news going to tell us about, and which are they going to ignore, right?

But, then also on a daily and nightly basis, which of them are they going to report in high volume, as opposed to which of them are going to be like 1 or 2 stories a year?

So for example, armed carjacking, shoplifting, retail theft, right?

Home invasions, those are the kind of things you see every single night on the news.

Do you remember there was a viral shoplifting video from a Walgreens in San Francisco a few years ago where the person was on a bicycle.

They were stuffing this bag, and they made it out, and got tens of millions of views.

That one retail theft sort of spun 309 local and national news stories around the country.

Just that one incident, right?

At the same time, there was no national news coverage whatsoever of the far larger wage theft by Walgreens.

So one thing that local news does is it reports certain crimes and certain incidents, typically incidents involving poor people, people of color, immigrants and strangers, right?

And it ignores the harms that are caused by, people who have power and wealth in our society.

So wage theft, that thing that's almost never reported in the local news is about $50 billion of harm a year in this country, so that it's about five times all of the property crime that police record combined, or tax evasion is about $1 trillion a year.

So that's 60 times all of that crime combined.

You don't see that in the local news.

And it's the volume of this coverage that kind of affects our own brain chemistry.

It kind of affects what we think is urgent.

I think that's a brilliant point, Alec, because when we look at the carceral state.

As I have discussed, on the program recently, the majority of incarcerated individuals, or system impacted individuals, are not sentenced to, based on acts of brutality or violent crime.

The majority of people who are in the system, in any given state, or in federal penitentiaries, are not people who committed violent offenses.

And your point is that the news media, specifically local news, are not an accurate reflection of the actually more balanced, that are part of the justice system, white collar and blue collar.

Now, I know you're not an advocate of expanding the carceral state, but the fact is that, whether it's being covered locally or nationally, the nonviolent offenses that do exist are not highlighted as having news value.

Is that accurate?

I think that's accurate.

I would also just add and complicate that by saying, only 4% of all police time in the US is devoted to what the police themselves call violent.

So 96% of their time is on other stuff.

Only 5% of all arrests are for violent crime.

So over the last few decades, US police have arrested more people for marijuana possession than all violent crime combined.

Okay.

But also it's a subtle question, I talk about this also in the book in terms of what kinds of harms are treated as serious or violent?

So there's millions of air pollution violations every single year and hundreds of thousands of known crimes that are spewing toxic stuff into our water.

Air pollution kills 100,000 people in the United States every single year.

That's five times all murder combined.

Okay?

Water pollution, similar, huge effects.

And we don't get push alerts on our phone from the local news about it.

We don't see stories every single night, and all the children and other people who are dying because of air pollution or water pollution in our own community.

And so the conception of which problems are treated in this kind of urgent, serious way, is itself another form of propaganda, sort of the news kind of determines which things we're motivated really seriously to fix, and which things we're not.

And I think this is combined with something called the selective curation of anecdote.

So even among the things like violent crime, right, the news media can make us think that those things are rising at any given moment, even when they're not.

So it's kind of like if you ask me to make an argument to a middle school basketball player, a young kid who's never watched the NBA, tell this kid about it was Michael Jordan, a great player.

I can make you a video of Michael Jordan's career, and I could include in that video only the shots that he missed.

It'd be like, nine hours long.

Just miss after miss after miss after miss.

I can show this video to this kid who's never watched the old NBA, and this kid might think Michael Jordan is not a good basketball player, he's missing all these shots, right?

I've used true anecdotes to create the false impression that Michael Jordan is a bad basketball player.

That's what the news media does with something like retail theft.

At a moment of when retail theft was not increasing in this country, and that property crime was at like historic 40, 50 year lows, the news media a couple of years ago made everybody think that retail theft and shoplifting were exploding.

It used true anecdotes of individual retail thefts and shoplifting to create that false impression.

And that is what the local news does every single day with all forms of crime.

It has a focus on certain kinds of crimes at certain kinds of moments to increase our sense of fear so that we go along with certain authoritarian, repressive policies that the police, prosecution and prison industrial complex, need to benefit themselves.

So you're saying that Feartopia, if you will, is the underlying foundation of Copaganda?

Which I want to say copgandia.

But you said copaganda.

In any event, what you're saying is non-ideological, on some level.

It's just the truth of the way we experience the local news.

And I do want to ask you if that is, as expressly hyperventilating in the national media and the nightly newscasts, or is there a degree of judgment and proportionality grounded in the facts that is empirically better?

I would say, and of course, my book is mainly focused on what is commonly called the mainstream media or the liberal media, right?

So I'm actually not focused on the right wing media.

I think that these... And that's what I'm asking you about, I'm asking you about the difference between an ABC affiliate and World News Tonight, right?

Is there a difference in how ABC News handles it at the national level, then a given ABC affiliate, in Atlanta, wherever.

I don't think so.

I think that the national news is just as bad, if not worse, although they do different kinds of stories.

So the local news media tends to do sort of just.

And this is getting better in some places, by the way.

And we're working with local news, producers and journalists all across the country to change how they do things, because it's actually not ideological in a lot of these places.

They don't want to be doing this.

And some of it had to do with, like, who brings them stories?

Well, the police are paid to bring them stories.

The police have multi-billion dollar PR budgets, right?

So the local news is doing a lot of just sort of reporting whatever the police tell them.

The national news is much more ideological, actually, in a sense.

And a lot of the people who are, who make it up into the sort of higher positions in national news, in my experience, are actually doing a slightly more sophisticated form of this.

They have more resources than your average local station.

They don't necessarily have to just print whatever the police tell them.

But there are a variety of mechanisms that I discuss in the book, including the weaponization of expertise, and these networks of people at elite universities and schools and nonprofits, that sort of feed, and the National Democratic Party plays a huge role in this, too.

They sort of feed national news outlets a slightly more sophisticated, more resource intensive version of all of this stuff.

So that's why in the book, actually, I focus a lot on the New York Times and, national outlets like The Atlantic or, NPR or, NBC.

Because I think it's really important to understand that different places within the copaganda ecosystem are doing very similar things in slightly different ways, and it's important to understand some of the differences between them.

Fair enough, let's go back to local news for a moment.

You were making the point that at the local level.

And that's why I asked you about national, because I don't think this gets quite as pervasively omitted at the national level.

But you're making the point that people are committing crimes, especially corporate crimes, with impunity.

In other words, the local news and national news are not going to cover, the Walgreens incident that you're mentioning.

And these are not necessarily incidents.

These are trends, whether it's price gouging or violations of, statute, local, state or federal law, air quality, water quality, you're saying this as it relates to multinational companies more so than housing violations, for example, you'll hear often on the local news about violations of, sanitary standards of restaurants.

And, often when it comes to housing, too, the local news will investigate, the criminal negligent landlord, right?

So you're specifically referring to incidents in cases of corporate criminality that don't get treated that way, and that should be served up to the people in equal numbers, proportionate to the incidents that are happening.

Yeah.

But also, if you look at the volume of news at the local level, the number of stories about, unsafe living conditions, caused by landlords or the number of stories about, lead poisoning in the soil or water in local areas, or the number of, stories about workplace safety violations and child labor violations.

They are dwarfed by the number of stories fed to the news by the police.

So the people that are testing our water and our soil and the people that are inspecting buildings, and the teachers at local schools, and the nurses at local hospitals, who have a lot to say about public safety.

They don't have huge PR departments, so they don't have a pipeline for feeding the local news.

And one thing that these local news anchors explained to me is we don't necessarily want to be contributing to this climate of fear, but we are strapped in terms of our personnel and budget.

So we have to fill 24 minutes of a local newscast at 6:30, and 7:00, and 10:30, and 11, and the police don't just send us, you know, like a few paragraphs of all the people they've arrested.

They send us video, audio, charts and graphs, people to interview experts, right?

So they actually produce the news for them.

If you take Los Angeles, for example, the Los Angeles sheriff alone.

So just the sheriff in LA has 42 full time PR people, right?

The LAPD has another 25.

So that's just 67 full time police just in the top two police departments in LA, not even counting the other several dozen police departments or the DA's offices or the city.

So, the teachers unions and the building inspectors and the tenants lawyers, they don't have those people.

So, when you actually look at the volume of local news, you're actually not getting even in local public safety coverage, as many stories as might be warranted by the sort of the relative importance to people's lives and safety of something like fire code violations or, you know, unsafe water, etc..

But I think your point is much more generally is correct.

The kinds of huge harms that large corporations and multinational corporations are committing, like, you take, the plastic littering epidemic, for example, there's trillions of pieces of plastic criminally littered into the United States every single year.

So much plastic is littered in the US in our soil and our water that we all have a a spoonful of plastic in our brains.

As I'm talking to you right now, it's a huge problem with devastating effects on global ecosystems and our own lives.

And that is treated by the news as maybe one investigative story a year.

You know, you'll see one big investigative piece every single year about, but you don't see stories every single day when companies are caught spewing this stuff into our environment.

And so therefore people feel less urgently about it.

They read it once a year and they say, oh, huh, I didn't know this.

And they shared their friend like, did you know we all have a spoon of plastic in our brain?

But, it's not thought of as a sort of urgent fear that in the same way that like shoplifting, when you walk into a CVS people are really afraid of it because you're hearing so many news stories about it.

Fair enough.

And I would alert our viewers and listeners to Paul Krugman's recent Substacks on this subject, specifically as it relates to the downward trend in violent crime.

And I think a lot of criminal activity in New York City, which may not be aligned with every, metropolis in the United States.

But the pure data, is quite clear.

Let's let's talk about the fear tactics that are deployed to racially or culturally demonize the other, the local media have also been accused long before Willie Horton, probably ever since Birth of a Nation, of the type of racialized coverage that is making, mostly non-white people, be the boogey person.

You said you're working with news stations, maybe news directors, is this going on still?

If so how does it manifest and how do you hope it changes?

There's so many ways.

Some of them subtle, some of them overt, that this stuff is still happening.

So there are a lot of news stations, for example, that still use mug shots in their reporting and that are every single day, you know, printing these kind of Willie Horton style mug shots.

Now, there are a lot of news organizations that have stopped doing that because there's a lot of new research about how, that kind of, reporting, especially when you choose the very same groups that are being targeted by the police disproportionately, poor people, people of color, particularly black people, immigrants, people with disabilities.

It actually makes the public fear those groups more.

And it actually leads to, more punitive, desires among the public.

As a way of addressing the supposed problems that the news is reporting on.

So there's also much more subtle ways that this comes out, right?

So, which harms against which people are treated as news, versus which harms against which people and which perpetrators are never really covered by the news.

That's another thing that we see a lot of in local newsrooms.

Another way that the local newsrooms do this is there's a constant, moral panic about one crime after another, after another, after another, after another.

The idea is that it keeps us in this sort of constant state of fear.

And it's one reason why, local news really contributes to the fact that over the last 25 years, because of this sort of, episodic nature of their coverage where they're constantly worried about some kind of low level crime committed by poor people, usually, most people think, according to Gallup polls, that crime is up in this society every single year.

And in fact, over the last 25 years, as you noted, crime has been going down almost every single year.

So much so that we now have historic, you know, at least half century lows in police reported crime.

But you wouldn't know that.

And the the polls don't reflect that.

Simultaneous, I just have to ask you, simultaneously, has incarceration dropped?

It's a mixed bag.

So incarceration was going up for some period of that time.

And over the last sort of 15 years it's been going down, significantly.

So anyway, I didn't want to interrupt but continue the point you were making.

Yeah.

So, now we have lower rates of incarceration than we've had, in about 10, 15 years.

And we have much lower rates of crime than we did 15 years ago.

So, you know, these things are hard to assess and judge.

But one thing we do know, looking across the world at other societies and in our own history, the societies with the lowest levels of imprisonment have the lowest levels of violent crime.

But the local news kind of distorts this, so much so that if you actually ask people what has crime been like in your own neighborhood, people are much more likely to be accurate.

So when asked about the thing that they can see the most closely with themselves, they're more accurate than when you're asked about things that they're only learning about through the mainstream consumption of news.

And that's really a profound indictment of our news culture.

You're less informed the more news that you consume.

Right, it tracks with the phenomenon of rating your own congressperson favorably.

What are we looking at this dystopia for?

Everybody's pleased with the lack of crime and the public service of their own representative.

Can we sing Kumbaya is the point.

So we're not.

And you're saying that the budgets of police, the militarization of, law enforcement in some ways has contributed to making this the norm in our consciousness.

Even if it's not the reality, meaning SWAT teams are every day being deployed to multiple locales in a given place, the thing I have to ask you about to close, Alec, is that the perception, the perception gap of laypeople is as much a result of what they see on the street.

I can't say with, certainty that as incarceration has declined, the prevalence of mental illness on the streets has increased.

But I think even the most ardent supporters of justice reform, would likely agree with that notion and that the images that you see, not just in metropolises, but all over in, outside of City Hall, in suburban and rural parts of this country, you see more prevalence of un-wellness.

And that can stimulate the same type of fear, and often justified fear.

And it strikes me that the justice movement would do well by focusing on this problem.

What say you, Alec?

This is one of the most important things that I can say.

And one of the most important aspects of the book.

And I get into this question a lot in the book, and I think people will be really surprised to read about this stuff in the book.

So I'll just say really quickly.

One of the biggest features of propaganda, in local news around our society, is the completely evidence free juxtaposition of what are really social problems like poverty, like lack of access to housing, and health care, lack of treatment for mental illness, various disabilities, etc.

and policing, or imprisonment.

So the mere juxtaposed of those two things is kind of like a modern flat Earther syndrome.

It's like climate science denial.

A lot of what local news does is it talks about some problem like, violent crime or, homelessness or, people with mental illness on the subway, or whatever it may be, tent encampments, right?

And then it talks about, the connection between those things and law enforcement, right?

Like policing and, that is completely inconsistent with all of the available empirical evidence.

So the levels of those things in our society have nothing to do with whether a sentence for a crime is seven years or four years, or whether there's 15 cops on patrol or 11 cops on patrol, whether a prosecutor who's progressive charges 54% of cases versus their predecessor charging 37% of cases.

What all of the evidence shows throughout societies across the world and throughout our own history, is that these problems, like homelessness, mental illness, etc., etc., poverty, violence they're much more correlated with levels of overall inequality in a society with access to health care, with economic factors that... That's true, that's true.

But what's also true is that people's feelings when they walk by, unhinged individuals, who may well be in that state as a result of the inequity you're describing.

What's not in dispute, Alec, is that it makes people feel a certain way, the same way as when they watch the local news and, whether it's fairly or unfairly criminalizing people.

But here's my point.

And I just want you to chew on this as you continue your book tour in advocacy.

You're right, it's social policy.

And it's a bit unfair Minority Report like to say, the movie, for those of you who aren't aware, look it up, to say these unhoused people are going to commit these crimes.

But when people, unstable people are more than just gesticulating but threatening, truly threatening people on the street.

And I just use that as one example, it could be in a bus, a subway.

Then that raises people's fear, justifiably.

And my point is saying this, which is those people don't belong in prison, they belong in mental health facilities.

And the ACLU, for all of its positive contributions to American life, would take issue with my stance just now.

As if there's not a problem.

It's not a prevalent problem.

And I don't know how we're going to push through this, this impasse, because it seems to me that this is a social problem as a result of inequities.

And yet, we don't have the capacity or law to deal with it.

I think I would just say, I can't speak for the ACLU, but from my own, you know, perspective, I have never minimized, any of these problems.

I think that all people deserve to be safe, and people deserve to feel safe.

What I'm focused on in the book is that the notion that the solution to that problem, or any of those problems you're talking about is more, armed government bureaucrats with handcuffs and people we call police, is completely contrary to all of the evidence, if you care about those problems and if you think of them as huge problems, urgent problems, and you care about them, then you should be supporting very different investments in our society, in systems of care.

As opposed to systems of control and punishment.

Absolutely.

And we're out of time, Alec.

You'll have to come back because this is such an important subject.

This is one of the most important subjects, that I can remember talking about on The Open Mind.

And therefore, I suggest everybody download on their Kindle or however they want to read it, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News.

Alec, a pleasure.

I hear you.

And I want our local news to understand the gravity of the health challenge on the streets and the inadequacy of the tools we have to deal with it right now, that's my point, and I know you share in that point.

Thank you again, Copaganda author, for your time today.

Thank you so much for having me.

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