Jennifer Abdo’s Reviews > Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News > Status Update

It is one thing to know intellectually thatthe punishment bureaucracy chooses not to persecute violations of drug laws, fraud, bribery, tax evasion, wage theft, environmental pollution, police brutality, and prosecutorial misconduct by elites, even though such crimes dwarf the harm of crimes they do prosecute. But it is quite another thing to see the ideology laid bare... harm by elites isn't "real" crime.

...the US cages six times more people per capita than its own pre-1980 historical average and five to ten times more than other countries, with a prison system that is one of the government's most bloated bureaucracies.

"Liberal democracies in the West were generally run for the benefit of the top, say, 20 percent of the wealth and income distribution. The trick...to keeping this scheme running smoothly has been to convince, especially at election time, the next 30 to 35 percent of the income distribution to fear the poorest half more than they envy the richest 20 percent." --James C. Scott

"The point is not that no one ever steals from trains or commits burglary. But the volume of news stories on police-reported crimes dwarfs their relative importance on any conceivable metric of objective global and domestic harm. Such a barrage of reporting affects which harmful things we feel emotionally terrified of and which harmful things we rarely think about."

Consider, for example, the frenzy over "retail theft" that took over local and national news after the uprisings over police violence in 2020. The same editors& reporters who wrote thousands of stories about low-level shoplifting from chain stores chose for years not to cover the estimated $137 million in corporate wage theft that happens every day, including by the same companies whose press releases about shoplifti

"The modest goal of this book is to reach people who do not have the goal of pushing society toward greater inequality and authoritarianism and are instead open to understanding the world more honestly and working for a better one."