Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
Join us for a provocative discussion with leading U.S. civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis about his new book Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News.
Karakatsanis is the Founder and Executive Director of Civil Rights Corps, one of the leading civil rights organizations in the United States. The work of Civil Rights Corps has freed hundreds of thousands of people from illegal jailing across the United States and returned tens of millions of dollars to the most vulnerable people in U.S. society.
In Copaganda, Karakatsanis explains how the propaganda apparatus that supports mass incarceration and rising authoritarianism in the U.S., as well as the role of liberal institutions like the news media, universities, and non-profits organizations. The book is timely also for the UK, where police and the media are performing many of the same propaganda functions: stoking fear as part of a broader trend to expand and increasingly privatize the bureaucracies of state surveillance and repression.
You can read more about the new book in the Columbia Journalism Review, watch Karakatsanis discuss how civil rights lawyers are fighting rising authoritarianism, or watch Karakatsanis's appearance on the Daily Show with Trevor Noah in 2022 discussing mass media propaganda.