Corporate media and the rise of fascism

I was invited to give a lecture at Oxford last month about police and prisons in the United States. After my talk, a student from Europe approached me and asked me: “Is there any hope to avoid fascism in the U.S. given the state of U.S. police and corporate media?”

The student’s question is urgent, and I hope prominent journalists will at least think about it.

I could pick many examples to illustrate the current situation, but here are two of them.

Femi @Femi_Sorry

Rep. Karianne Lisonbee: "It's not that I don't trust Women to clnttol their own bodies... I trust Women to control when they allow men to ejaculate inside of them - to control intake of semen” I hate this planet. #RoeVsWade

And the quote below is from a recent New Yorker article about a candidate for Governor in Pennsylvania. Both quotes are representative of an entire political movement that is already in power in much of the U.S.:

Mastriano continues to exhort his followers, whom he calls his “army,” to overthrow democratically elected leaders. He has vowed, if elected, to throw out all current voter registrations and to appoint a like-minded secretary of state, who could reverse election results. “As governor, I get to appoint the secretary of state,” he said recently, on a far-right radio show. “And I have a voting-reform-minded individual who’s been traveling the nation and knows voting reform extremely well.” He has also threatened to dismantle the mechanics of voting in Pennsylvania. “With the stroke of a pen, I can decertify every single machine in the state,” he has said.

Things like this are happening all over the U.S. (and much of the world). Moreover, throughout the United States, the criminalization of women’s bodies unleashed by last week’s Supreme Court decision is only the beginning of similar right-wing plans. The next steps, among many others already planned in the short term by right-wing extremists, will be laws that:

• Criminalize consensual sexual acts between adults;

• Prohibit contraception;

• Ban travel to other states or countries to get reproductive care;

• Mandate total police surveillance of the reproductive process across the population, backed by artificial intelligence and algorithmic tehnology that tracks women’s personal associations, locations, and biological cycles.

• Criminalize anyone who helps or provides any material support to anyone looking to access reproductive care or contraception or anyone who engages in certain consensual sexual acts not just in the states with such laws but to anyone living outside those states who helps someone living there—along with the potential for criminal indictments in right-wing states that, under existing U.S. law, would require extradition and civil fines and judgments that existing U.S. law and federal courts would require any state to honor under the threat of contempt and eventually jailing.

The threat of fascism is imminent, and never before has such a political movement had such breathtaking technological tools at its disposal to track and silence opposition.

In the face of existential threats like fascism—as well as other existential threats like the one posed by our existing economic and political systems to the ecological survival of our planet—many U.S. journalists in outlet after outlet are running story after story about whether a few types of narrow police-reported crimes by poor people are up or down by a number of a few dozen per city.

This coverage is absurd on its own terms. What police report as “crime” ignores the vast majority of actual crime and is only a tiny approximation of much larger threats to our safety. Moreover, even this narrow category of police-reported crime is near *historic lows,* and fluctuations (up or down) discussed in the media’s standard crime stories are small on any objective view of total harm.¹ They don’t compare to death, illness, and injury from poverty, pollution, traffic, lack of health care, etc.

Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec

For preliminary context, understand that police-reported crime is both a terrible approximation of harm but also is itself near historic lows even according to the police themselves.

It’s not just the media’s reporting about “crime data” though. It’s the sheer volume of stories in the daily news featuring individual anecdotes about individual crimes. Stories about low-level crimes by the poor dominate the news, and most people don’t think too much about why certain things are treated as urgent news every night and who benefits from those decisions.² They have no idea about these processes because we aren’t taught to question how a particular crime story becomes “news.” Scaring the public about poor people through a high volume of anecdotal crime stories benefits people who own things and who control our political system. At the end of the day, they want people scared only about *some* crimes by *some* people because it helps them get support for repressive policies like increased police surveillance that are designed to preserve inequality and crush dissent.

I want to say this clearly: Public safety is important. I do the work I do as a civil rights lawyer standing alongside people living in conditions that are unacceptably violent because I care about all forms of violence and harm. I write these words because I care about everyone’s safety, including the most vulnerable people in our society. Anyone who truly cares about the safety of our communities and of all the animals and plants that make up our natural world should pay attention to:

• The crimes of the powerful that police choose not to look for, let alone report;

• The myriad harms and threats to safety that elites don't classify as “crimes” at all and that they don’t bother trying to regulate through the punishment system;

• The fact that our society’s massive investment in police and prisons has not made us safer than other countries; and

• The fact that the police state now being expanded through the media’s distorted coverage of crime has the technological capacity not just to control people’s bodies and lives like never before, but also to crush movements against inequality and for social justice more thoroughly than any police state that has yet existed. It is no accident that police have attempted to surveil, infiltrate, and crush every social movement seeking racial, gender, environmental, and economic justice since 1900.

Narrowing our conception of safety to only a small range of crimes is one of the chief tasks of the police “public relations” units that now exist in every major police department. Their function is to distract people from what are objectively the greatest threats we face and to suggest to readers that spending more on the criminal punishment bureaucracy is a natural, effective response to those limited threats. In this way, these police units function a lot like the PR departments of oil companies denying global warming for decades in the face of all available scientific evidence.

Police could not spread this misinformation effectively without the news media.

When I talk about journalists here, I’m not talking about right-wing partisans. Obviously a big portion of corporate media sees its role as promoting authoritarianism, and many journalists at certain outlets overtly push a white nationalist Christian theocracy. I’m talking about the far larger number of journalists who care about safety, evidence, equality, and democracy. I'm trying to highlight these issues for the many journalists who want people to understand the world better through their work.

For example, in advance of the recent right-wing campaign to recall the DA in San Francisco, a well-regarded liberal journalist wrote 4,000 words for the Atlantic “exploring” some people’s perceptions (i.e. not reality) that “crime” rates in San Francisco were increasing (they aren’t) and that all of this “disorder,” homelessness, and drug use was somehow linked to a few policies of the progresive DA (they aren’t). The content was bad and gave a platform to anti-science right-wing misinformation without providing crucial context. But the decision to write the piece at all—and the media’s decision to frame so many similar articles touching on such important social topics through the lens of minor tweaks to criminal punishment policies—is more perplexing. Not only is reporting focusing on minor policy shifts by punishment bureaucrats failing to educate people about the most urgent threats to everyone’s safety, but it manipulates what people see as urgent and points them toward reactionary solutions.

Crime in San Francisco is historically low, and yet several right-wing billionaires, the police union, and media articles like the one in the Atlantic convinced a scared public to blame the city’s growing inequality on a progressive DA who has almost no power to affect the root causes of crime one way or another. It’s like blaming an earthquake on a group of school children jumping up and down too much.

The result, however, will be very significant. The result will be a much more regressive DA pursuing harsher surveillance and punishment that all available scientific evidence shows will only increase future crime. Ironically then, these kinds of articles will do nothing to help—and will distract the public from addressing—the city’s actual root causes of the very outcomes they decry: soaring inequality, generational lack of affordable housing, divestment from early childhood education, lack of sufficient high quality medical care and mental health treatment, abandonment of ambitious public arts programs, toxic masculinity, general alienation, lack of solidarity, etc.

To take just a few examples, the media could have created public urgency through large volumes of stories about the distribution of wealth, illegal evictions, the number of people who die each night from preventable poverty, the crisis of teachers providing early childhood education in underfunded classrooms, the catastrophic effects of preventable air, water, and plastics pollution, slashes to public funding for infrastructure and the arts, widespread death and suffering caused by lack of access to medical and mental health care, the burgeoning field of research on the effect of social isolation, etc. These are all breaking news stories on crimes against a humane society. The only difference is that they are examples of structural violence.

At the end of the day, the thing missing from almost every "crime" story in local news is the actual scientific consensus: when people harm each other, it has far more to do with inequality, poverty, social connection, the environment, mental health, etc. than the number of armed government bureaucrats or the number of criminal prosecutions.

I can’t stress this enough: even if crime were up significantly in San Francisco or other cities, the news obsessing over multiple stories every day about a few more retail thefts or a few fewer drug convictions and writing think pieces “exploring” what role minor local prosecutorial shifts are playing in crime trends is like staying in the dining room of the Titanic ordering a gluten-free avocado toast as the ship sinks.

In the face of the existential threats we face, it’s not the most urgent role of the national media to explore whether there are several dozen more or less index crimes in any given city or whether those fluctuations are linked to short term rhetoric of competing politicians operating within very narrow policy boundaries. It’s true that there are actually fewer crimes in San Franciso according to the police, but more broadly, the United States has unacceptably high levels of prevetnable violence, harm, illness, suffering, and death regardless of what narrow police statistics say. All of us who care about the world should help people focus on the greatest risks and the known solutions.

Unfortunately for us, the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and many elite outlets specialize in faux-intellectual, anti-science drivel that is predicated on promoting the wrong solutions to the wrong problems. They suffer from a pathology: they are unwilling to treat structural inequality as an urgent news issue, and so they are constantly trying to explain and address what are structural problems with only superficial policy conversations that don’t engage with the core problems of how our soceity is organized. This journalism is therefore preventing us from noticing and then solving our most consequential problems.

But there is something much worse going on than mere diversion and distraction. This kind of journalism creates widespread fear and misinformation that leads both the public and the elite politicians who hang out in the bubbles that treat this punditry seriously to think that more state repression is the only acceptable response to structural social problems. In this way, journalism like this ends up playing a key role in building authoritarian state surveillance and punishment bureaucracies.

The underlying premise in all of this journalism—that more investment in punishment is linked with more safety—is so widespread and unchallenged that it has become group-think in elite spaces even though it is like climate-science denial. I have seen this group-think almost everywhere I go in the “criminal justice reform” world, including meetings with politicians, conversations with newspaper editorial boards and podcast producers, philanthropy convenings, zoom calls among all of us well-intentioned non-profit leaders, etc. I cannot tell you how many rooms I have been in where leading Democratic Party and non-profit strategists decide that they have to pretend that more investment in punishment will be better for safety because of how the media will cover any attempt to reinvest money away from punishment and into socially productive services. In this way, these liberal elites are building the fascist prison in which they—and all of us—will perish.

My own personal view is that building a political coaliiton that relentlessly attacks the structural root causes of crime by investing in the things communities need and want would be a more popular short- and long-term political strategy. But in this post, I am making a more limited point: the pervasive media coverage of a selective slice of crime and the news media’s refusal to draw the connections for people between the most serious harms and the solutions that evidence supports to address those harms poses a profound danger to all of us, not just a few progressive politicians who might get recalled.

And so I wasn’t sure what to tell the student at Oxford. We have to keep doing the work of resisting the growth of surveillance, state violence, and hoarding of wealth, as well as the misinformation and myths used to justify it. Nothing is more urgent. We have to build power and be in mutual aid and solidarity with the most vulnerable. Nothing is more important. But we also have to hope that leading liberals and elites in journalism who still control a lot of the media institutions appreciate the existential risk before it’s too late.

This piece was adapted from a Twitter thread published on May 24, 2022.

1. Preventable air pollution kills 5 times as many people in the U.S. as homicide. Wage theft dwarfs all police-reported property crime combined. Tax evasion costs 63 times all police-recorded property crime combined. Cops themselves steal more money from people than all burglary combined. The vast majority of sexual assault survivors choose not to even tell police about it. I could go on. But the objective facts about actual harm are not controversial. Police crime statistics are a lazy, highly manipulated, pathetic substitute for evaluating how safe we are.

2. The reasons crimes committed by the poor dominate local news coverage are too complex to discuss comprehensively here. They have a lot to do with the culture of newsrooms and the idologies and economic incentives that dominate them, as well as how fully newsrooms have been commandeered by their daily collaboration with certain government sources they rely on for access. And, the social psychology of manufacturing moral panics is more irrestable than ever for legacy news outlets trying to compete for space amongst social media, newsletters, and the tech industry’s grip in the new attention economy; “If it bleeds, it ledes” has become an even more self-fulfilling maxim that constitutes in the minds of many editors an easy way out of providing compelling, engaging, critical information that has real social value.