I wrote the book Copaganda based on my years of being a civil rights lawyer and public defender representing the most vulnerable people in our society. I watched as the police and the news media distorted how we think about our collective safety. Copaganda makes us afraid of the most powerless people, helps us ignore far greater harms committed by people with money and power, and always pushes on us the idea that our fears can be solved by more money for police, prosecution, and prisons. Based on the evidence, this idea of more investment in the punishment bureaucracy making us safer is like climate science denial.

  • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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    4 days ago

    How to Tell a Lie with the Truth

    The selective curation of anecdote is an essential mechanism of copaganda. … By cherry-picking anecdotes—indeed, even by using isolated individual pieces of data as misleading anecdotes—news reports can distort our interpretation of the world.

    I feel like this is a truly vital thing to understand about propaganda in general. Very often, everything that’s being said is true. The art is in what to focus on, how much emphasis to give to small pieces of the picture, and how to give them emotional weight so that the artificially inflated singular piece you’re presenting will become a lasting and resonant part of people’s image of the picture as a whole.

    • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      Headline: “Teen Stabs Woman After Playing Violent Video Game”

      Alternative equally true headline about the same story they’d never use: “Teen Stabs Woman After Eating Cheeseburger”

    • Angry_Autist (he/him)@lemmy.world
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      It doesn’t even have to be true or false. ‘Uncle Sam’ was propaganda to get young men to enlist out of national pride.

      There were no facts in the ‘I want you’ campaign, it was pure emotional appeal

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    This is one of the pernicious functions of NPR here: to give liberal news consumers intellectual permission to support more funding for more police because, although it is baselessly connected to less murder, even marginalized people targeted by police supposedly want it.

    TIL NPR features whitewashed conservative propaganda

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    teenvouge

    Damn this is some hard hitting reporting for an outlet catering to teens, is that what the kids are into these days? LMAO

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      Teenvouge has been killing it this year. This isn’t the first really good article from them posted here

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      The kids are usually more hip to cynicism about the zeitgeist than the adults are. Anti-Vietnam War, “Life in Hell,” anti-Iraq War and Ron Paul, Teen Vogue is just following in the proud tradition.

      I mean it is surprising and cool that a fashion centered magazine is doing real talk about politics, but the part that makes it surprising is the “Vogue,” not the “Teen.”

  • HubertManne@piefed.social
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    I can’t believe the judge being charged is going anywhere. It should immediately be thrown out. Thats the case for many of these things that have no standing.

  • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    I’m loving that there’s been some more Alec Karakatsanis on Lemmy lately!

    He’s probably the best at exposing and explaining systemic disinformation I’ve ever seen, maybe one of the best at it in the entire world.