How to Sniff Out ‘Copaganda’: When the Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

In each case, there were almost immediate policy responses that increased the budgets of punishment bureaucrats, passed more punitive laws, and diverted the system’s resources from other priorities. For example, the shoplifting panic led California state lawmakers to furnish $300 million more to police and prosecutors so they could punish retail theft more aggressively. A few months later, the California governor announced yet another measure, the “largest-ever single investment to combat organized retail theft,” adding another $267 million to fifty-five police agencies. Justifying the move, the governor said: “When shameless criminals walk out of stores with stolen goods, they’ll walk straight into jail cells.”

So, how do moral panics happen?

During the 1960s and 1970s in England and the U.S., the news focused on Black people, poor people, and immigrants as the source of uncontrollable “crime waves.” Their stories were nearly identical to what we see today: media panic about “crime waves” and quotes from police, prosecutors, and judges about the need to roll back so-called reforms framed as too lenient. The rhetoric of current punishment bureaucrats and pundits echoes almost verbatim the opinions voiced by conservative white business and police groups of the 1970s, although now there is more of an effort, as I’ll discuss later, to portray such views as “progressive” and demanded by marginalized people themselves. In each case, minor tweaks in bureaucratic policy or marginal reforms that could not, as a matter of empirical reality, have a significant impact on society-wide violence are vehemently debated. The evidence of the root causes of interpersonal harm—like that marshaled by the Kerner Commission, which studied U.S. crime in 1968 and recommended massive social investment to reduce inequality—is ignored.

And the cycle continues: moral panic is followed by calls for more police surveillance, militarization, higher budgets for prosecutors and prisons, and harsher sentencing. Because none of these things affect violence too much, the problems continue.

How to Tell a Lie with the Truth

The selective curation of anecdote is an essential mechanism of copaganda. Imagine two scenarios. A city had ten thousand shoplifting incidents in 2023, down from fifteen thousand shoplifting incidents in 2022. But in 2023, a local news outlet ran a story every day about a different shoplifting incident, while in 2022, the news ran only fifteen stories all year on shoplifting incidents. In which city do you think the public is more likely to believe shoplifting is a greater problem, even a crisis? In the city with more shoplifting, or the city with twenty-five times more stories about shoplifting?

By cherry-picking anecdotes—indeed, even by using isolated individual pieces of data as misleading anecdotes—news reports can distort our interpretation of the world. Using a similar process, they can also distort our understanding of what other people—particularly people with whom we don’t interact—think about the world. Because one can find anyone to say essentially anything, reporters have leeway to select which “true” views of “ordinary people” to share and which to ignore.

One of my favorite examples comes from Copaganda Hall of Famer Martin Kaste, who for some reason National Public Radio still permits to cover the police. (I awarded Kaste this honor in absentia during a private ceremony attended by two cats and my research assistants in my basement.) In 2022, Kaste published an article and widely disseminated radio piece about a rise in shootings and murders during the pandemic. Murders were down nationally in 2022 when he published the stories but they had increased in 2020 and 2021. As with much of Kaste’s police reporting, the article is a buffet for the copaganda gourmand.