Copaganda with Alec Karakatsanis [TEASER]

Hey everyone, this is Leon from Prologue Projects.

On this subscriber-only episode of 5-4, Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael are talking to civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis about his new book, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News.

In his new book, Alec takes a wide-ranging look at the ways in which news coverage of crime and public safety is shaped by corporate interests and law enforcement talking points, and contributes to a climate of fear that in turn justifies repressive public policy.

This is 5-4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court and the punishment bureaucracy suck.

Welcome to 5-4, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have attacked our civil rights, like our neighborhood cat attacking the chipmunks in my backyard.

I'm Peter.

I'm here with Michael.

Hey, everybody.

And Rhiannon.

Hello.

Hi, everyone.

And we are joined by Alec Harcatanis, civil rights lawyer and founder of Civil Rights Corps.

Hi, everybody.

Welcome back to the show.

Hi, Alec.

Thanks for having me back.

Maybe our most frequent, no, that's got to be Jay Willis or Joe C.W.

Rice.

Yeah, but Alec is up there.

He's in contention.

Yeah, yeah.

This has got to be, I want to say this is like the third appearance by Alec on 5 to 4.

That sounds right.

White Boy Hall of Fame.

We had exciting conversations about younger abstention, if I recall correctly, the criminalization of poverty.

That's right.

And now we're only two weeks before it's officially illegal, give or take.

To be poor.

To be poor.

To be poor.

I won't elaborate on the cat in my backyard.

I will say, though, I'm in the process of defending the chipmunks without harming the cat.

So everyone calm down.

Don't worry about it.

Yeah.

No screaming about animal rights stuff.

Yeah.

Now, today we are going to talk a bit about police propaganda, nicknamed Coppaganda, which Alec just wrote a book on, also titled Coppaganda.

So we're going to talk first about what this is, why you started researching it, Alec, and we can turn to some of the topics in your book, how it manifests in the media, what the incentives behind it are, maybe how to spot it, and some of the beefs you've had with various academics over the last several years.

So I'll sort of leave defining it up to you, Alec.

But, you know, I think the way that you put it in your book is that during the George Floyd protests in 2020, you notice what looked like a sort of police PR campaign.

And this sort of sent you down a path of researching police PR, police propaganda, and led you to this book.

So can you sort of bring us there to 2020 when you sort of saw this?

We're recording this interview actually a couple days before the five-year anniversary of the burning down of the Minneapolis police precinct.

And I think that was a very important moment because there were some public polls that came out around that time that showed over half the country supported the burning of that precinct.

That was a very scary time for a lot of people in the establishment.

And I think we saw an incredible reactionary backlash to those uprisings that was characterized by wall-to-wall fear-mongering propaganda in support of the policing and punishment bureaucracies.

I don't think this is particularly unique as I talk about this is a long-standing feature of news coverage.

There's nothing particularly new about this period, but it was sort of the period that I was living through and that I was...

was watching in city after city in the course of doing our civil rights work.

And I became kind of obsessed with tracking all of the ways in which the mainstream news was distorted.

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