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Teen Vogue’s article “How to Sniff Out ‘Copaganda’: When the Police and the Media Manipulate Our News” (an excerpt from Alec Karakatsanis’s new book Copaganda) shows how police departments use friendly reporters and isolated crime anecdotes to stoke fear, frame marginalized people as threats, and win bigger budgets and harsher laws. Karakatsanis walks readers through famous “moral panics” (from the 1980s “crack-baby” scare to today’s retail-theft headlines) to demonstrate how true-but-unrepresentative stories become sweeping, misleading narratives. He critiques outlets such as NPR for repeating these stories without broader context, argues that over-policing diverts attention and money from root-cause solutions like housing, health care, and education, and urges readers to scrutinize sensational crime coverage. All royalties from Copaganda go to the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, and the author is distributing free copies to incarcerated people and educators.
