What we don't tell people - by Alec Karakatsanis

I’m taking a little break from writing these posts because I’ve been asked to turn the newsletter into a book on Copaganda. That is taking up a lot of the time I’m not working on our civil rights cases. But, in researching for the book, I kept coming across a pattern that I wanted to write about: the news either ignores or distorts the actual substance of the ideas held by people challenging the status quo. Erase and Distort I have been reading hundreds of articles across news outlets and watching as many news videos as is possible while still living a life full of joy, and I am continually shocked at the superficiality with which critiques of the status quo are presented. This has a consequence: the public has almost no understanding of what critics of the punishment bureaucracy are proposing or that overwhelming evidence supports those critiques.1 A cartoonish example of this phenomenon is a recent video in which journalist Glenn Greenwald interviewed journalist Lee Fang. The theme o

I’m taking a little break from writing these posts because I’ve been asked to turn the newsletter into a book on Copaganda. That is taking up a lot of the time I’m not working on our civil rights cases. But, in researching for the book, I kept coming across a pattern that I wanted to write about: the news either ignores or distorts the actual substance of the ideas held by people challenging the status quo. Erase and Distort I have been reading hundreds of articles across news outlets and watching as many news videos as is possible while still living a life full of joy, and I am continually sh