Dan

“Later she told me, “The restraining order was the catalyst that pushed him over the edge. I hesitated a long time before I went forward to get it, but the company urged me on. Ultimately, I was told that my reluctance might be impacting my advancement at work. That was when I finally said, ‘Okay, it’s worth taking a chance.’ The shooting was the day before we were to appear in court with Farley to make the temporary restraining order permanent.” But Laura spent that day and many more in the hospital. Farley spent that day and many more in jail. Newspeople spent that day, and many more, reporting that Farley had “just snapped” and gone on a shooting spree. But that never, ever happens.”
― Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

“It was the categorization and presentation of these true events into themes with particular causes and effects that distorted reality. It would be like making Michael Jordan appear to be a bad basketball player by compiling a highlight reel that consists entirely of every missed shot in his career. The selective curation of anecdote is an essential mechanism of copaganda.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“If you consumed news in 2023, I bet you did not know that the federal government found thousands of child labor violations that year, the most documented violations in two decades.24 But individual stories about vulnerable children are not told in high volume, unless it is a story about police arresting them for something.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“But even in Seattle, which was an outlier in slightly reducing its police budget by about 10 percent, the reduction didn’t affect relevant police operations, and police executives themselves in internal memos identified non-essential duties that armed officers could cut without affecting enforcement of violent crime (such as parking meter ticketing). Indeed, as the local NPR station reported, debunking the “myth” that Seattle police were defunded, “not a single sworn officer has lost their job or pay due to budget constraints.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News