NYT Responded to Subway Shooting With 'Relentless String of Copaganda'
FAIR
Alec Karakatsanis, founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, and author of the book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System, is noted for his incisive criticism of corporate media crime coverage on Twitter. He weighed in (4/12/22) on the New York Times' reporting on the New York subway shooting; here's that thread, lightly edited for ease of reading.
The New York Times responded to a mass subway shooting with a relentless string of copaganda. Let’s look closely at how the NYT used a crisis to boost police talking points and lies in some creative ways.
First, the NYT used the mass shooting to direct readers to unrelated articles awash in police talking points:
I’ve separately addressed the reporting that NYT tried to use the mass shooting to get more attention for here:
This is subtle, but the NYT is making a political move here: It is linking a unique mass shooting event by a lone gunman to the kinds of daily crime stories it has been writing suggesting (contrary to the evidence) that neighborhood crime is out of control.
Second, did you notice that the NYT markets these three copaganda articles as “what you need to know”? A pernicious aspect of the NYT is its decades-long effort not just to shape people’s views of the world (e.g., more cops is good), but to tell them that it is “all the news that’s fit to print.” The NYT narrowly curtails our worldview, and then convinces us this is all we "need" to know.
Third, let me note a few of the many bad things with these pieces. The lead article on the shooting today did not mention that the US is an outlier in the availability of guns, or poverty, or inequality, or lack of mental healthcare, or that New York just added more cops to subways.
Nowhere in articles about the shooting is the possibility raised that all of the investments in new cops didn’t (and can’t) stop events like this. Nowhere is the scientific consensus mentioned: Violence is mostly not a function of police at all. Why is this missing? Who benefits?
What does the NYT do instead? It points readers to a fabrication by the NYPD that a recent decline of nine homicides in an arbitrarily selected three-month period was due to “a surge of arrests.” Let me be clear: The timing of this doesn’t add up, and not a shred of evidence supports it.
The stakes are enormous. The NYT lets police make stuff up, suggesting a link between 4,000 arrests in March to shooting declines in January and February. This would be laughable if it weren’t leading millions of people to think there is some connection between mass arrests and murder prevention.
Fourth, the NYT editors went in and altered the initial factual headline to create a narrative. This was a choice. Why? Who benefits from creating this constant fear?
As I've noted, major corporate media have huge incentives to play up fears over certain kinds of harm but to ignore far larger harms:
Fifth, the NYT also uses the opportunity to link to Eric Adams defending the return to brutal, illegal and ineffective “broken windows” policing. Incredibly, the NYT asserts as a fact that the goal of such policing was to “prevent more serious crime”:
This NYT "fact" would come as a surprise to the generation of scholars who have demonstrated that such policing was about controlling certain populations, serving interests of developers, part of an explicit gentrification strategy, boosting overtime pay, racial control, etc.
This is just pure political propaganda to couch the very specific goals of elite capitalists and police union enforcers as ostensibly about "preventing" crime. It was never about that, and the NYT doesn't even suggest anyone thinks otherwise! Unreal.
So, with all the extra clicks that the NYT gets from a breaking shooting, it used the opportunity to stoke fear, steer readers to police lies, highly dubious assertions portrayed as fact, and science-denying suggestions that more cops (and not less inequality) is the answer to violence.
I feel like a broken record, but it’s warranted, because the NYT is a broken record: With all the breathless stories about violence, all types of crime in NYC and the US are near historic lows. People literally don't believe this actual fact because of news coverage like this.
An emergency focusing on interpersonal "crime" committed by poor people is being manufactured before our eyes. And the same news institutions do not provide the same urgency to genuine threats to human civilization.
This was long and hard. If you made it this far, here is a cat named Franklin who jumped in a box this morning.
Featured image: New York Times depiction of the aftermath of the Brooklyn subway shooting.
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