Copaganda by Alec Karakatsanis, Book Review

Why This Book Matters, What It Actually Argues, and What You’re Left With After Closing It

Alec Karakatsanis’s Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News isn’t just a critique of crime reporting — it’s a dismantling of the mental architecture most Americans use to understand harm, “safety,” and the role of the state. If you’re picking up this book or just finished reading it, this review is meant to help you understand what the book is doing, why it hits so hard, and how to think with it after the final chapter.

WHAT COPAGANDA IS REALLY ABOUT

On the surface, the book is about policing and media narratives. But underneath, it’s about something bigger:

Copaganda is the systematic shrinking of our political imagination.

Karakatsanis argues that propaganda doesn’t merely distort facts —
it limits what we believe is possible.
What counts as “crime.”
Who counts as “dangerous.”
What counts as “safety.”
What solutions count as “serious.”

He shows how stories about harm are curated to focus on poor and marginalized individuals while ignoring the structural violence that kills far more people — pollution, wage theft, medical neglect, corruption, exploitation.

This isn’t accidental.
It is the outcome of power deciding what stories get told and what stories never appear.

If you’re reading this book expecting a policy argument, you’ll be surprised. It’s more like a revelation of the water we’ve been swimming in.

KEY IDEAS THE BOOK DELIVERS (AND WHY THEY MATTER)

1. Selective Curation of Anecdotes

This is one of the most important concepts in the book. Media chooses which crimes become stories.

Street crime? Constant coverage.
Corporate harm? Silence.

Karakatsanis points out that air pollution kills over 100,000 people a year — five times the number of homicides — but it never leads the evening news. This curated reality shapes public emotion and political will.

If you’re reading the book, notice how often you internally accept certain harms as “normal” — that’s the conditioning he is exposing.

2. Chomsky’s Spectrum of Debate

Karakatsanis expands on an idea from Noam Chomsky:
limit the range of acceptable opinions and
allow loud debate only within those limits.

In crime discourse, this looks like:

• longer sentences vs. shorter sentences

• more police vs. better-trained police

• pretrial detention vs. supervised release

But never:
why do we rely on cages at all?

If you just finished the book, this is probably the idea still ringing in your head — the sense that your entire life you’ve been debating the menu instead of the restaurant.

3. The Punishment Bureaucracy (and Its Lack of Evidence)

One of the most startling arguments is that punishment as a system is not studied. Not seriously. Not empirically.

We don’t evaluate:

• the trauma of family separation

• the community effects of incarceration

• the failure of long sentences to prevent harm

• the costs imposed on the poorest neighborhoods

Instead, we treat punishment like default infrastructure — an 18th-century institution running on autopilot.

If you’re midway through the book, this is where the shock hits:
how is it possible that the most expensive and violent institution in the country operates with less scrutiny than a middle school lunch program?

4. The Role of Media in Manufacturing Legitimacy

Karakatsanis doesn’t accuse the media of conspiratorial plotting — he demonstrates something subtler: structural alignment.

Journalists rely on police for crime stories →
Police get to frame events →
Violence by the poor is spotlighted →
Violence by the powerful is invisible →
Public fear is shaped →
Budgets and policies follow fear, not evidence.

If you’re reading the book for the first time, this section often feels like the world’s most disturbing “behind the scenes” documentary.

5. The Big Deception: Intentions vs. Structures

One of the most powerful arguments — and one he expands on in his Substack — is that media coverage focuses obsessively on the good intentions of individual prosecutors, cops, and bureaucrats.

“He was trying to make the neighborhood safer.”
“She was doing her best.”
“They’re just trying to solve the problem.”

Karakatsanis argues this is propaganda.

Why?

Because intentions don’t explain why harmful policies persist despite evidence.
Structures do.
Profit motives do.
Political agendas do.
Racial hierarchies do.

If you’re someone who wants actionable takeaways, this is the one to underline:
focusing on intentions hides the actual machinery of power.

THE EXPERIENCE OF READING THE BOOK

What makes Copaganda so unusually effective is the way it shifts your perception mid-sentence. It reads like someone pointing out the obvious — the kind of obvious you somehow never saw, even though it was right in front of you.

Most chapters combine:

• storytelling

• legal casework

• data

• media analysis

• public health research

The tone is calm but devastating.

And because the book doesn’t rely on outrage or hot takes, the arguments don’t evaporate when the chapter ends. They stick.

By the time you finish, you start seeing copaganda everywhere — not as bias, but as architecture.

IF YOU JUST FINISHED THE BOOK: WHAT TO TAKE WITH YOU

1. Notice what’s missing from news stories.

Ask yourself:
“Whose harm is never covered here?”

2. Question every framing that treats cages as inevitable.

If the story begins with punishment, the imagination is already collapsed.

3. Pay attention to who benefits from the narrative.

Karakatsanis names entire industries — prisons, police unions, courts, carceral telecoms, insurance companies, real estate developers — that profit from the system exactly as it is.

Once you see that, you can’t go back to pretending this is about “public safety.”

4. Don’t confuse order with safety.

Safety is built.
Order is enforced.
Those are not the same thing.

5. Treat imagination as political work.

The biggest lesson of the book:
You cannot reform a worldview you cannot first imagine.

IS THIS BOOK FOR YOU?

Read Copaganda if you:

• are interested in abolition, reform, or public safety

• want to understand why our crime discourse feels broken

• work in journalism, politics, organizing, education, or law

• suspect the nightly news is shaping your fears more than your knowledge

• want a clear, evidence-based framework that cuts through noise

Skip it if you:

• want a simple argument for “more police” or “less police”

• want a partisan take

• prefer policy tweaks to structural analysis

This book is not incremental.
It is transformational.

FINAL TAKE

Copaganda is not just a book about policing.
It is a book about the limits placed on our imagination by powerful institutions that need us to believe cages are common sense.

Alec Karakatsanis widens the frame so we can finally see the fog we’ve been breathing.

If you’re interested in the future of public safety, media literacy, or democracy itself, this is required reading. Not because it gives you answers — but because it teaches you to ask the right questions.