Copaganda How police and the media manipulate our news

American journalists routinely mislead the public when reporting on the police, according to this troubling study. Civil rights lawyer Karakatsanis (Usual Cruelty) argues that police are neglecting their duty to fight and solve crime, citing studies showing officers spend only 4% of their time responding to violent crime and rarely pursue endemic white-collar crimes like wage theft. He contends that such criticism of the police rarely makes it into the news because of the sway held by savvy police PR departments (the LAPD alone employs 25 full-time PR specialists). 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 (which are instead affected by social factors like unemployment). Such pro-funding "propaganda" about law enforcement and crime rates works its way into the news in roundabout ways, Karakatsanis demonstrates; for example, a 2022 Atlantic article suggested that a court backlog in Albuquerque caused an uptick in homicides, implying that resolving the backlog would somehow reduce homicides--not only a nonsensical theory, according to Karakatsanis, but one disproven by the fact that other crimes with similar backlogs saw declines over the same period. Karakatsanis's meticulous study suggests a disturbing lack of analytical ability from reporters. Readers will be aghast. (Apr.)