Mainstream media helped build the myth of law enforcement [View all]

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Mainstream media helped build the myth of law enforcement
Alec Karakatsanis explained how the news media demonizes the poor while protecting the powerful

By Nicholas Liu
Reporter
Published January 20, 2026 10:30AM (EST)


(Salon) SWAT team-style raids, verbal and physical antagonism, and threats against citizen and journalists alike have long been embedded in the history of law enforcement in the United States, through both Republican and Democratic administrations. But after decades of attitudes largely sitting between grudging acceptance and hero-worship, the last ten years has seen a surge of negative attention toward policing in America, provoked by acts of extreme aggression carried out with far less subtlety than before and that has, by spreading first on social media, forced mainstream media outlets to cover it extensively.

Critics of this media coverage, like civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis, say that since its conception in the United States, media’s role has been less to offer objective news and more to shape an obedient society that blames their problems on its most vulnerable, emphasizing a belief that state punishment is the solution. And even with the pressure to cover egregious behavior like the harsh treatment of immigrants by ICE, he argues, media outlets have continued to feed into the superstructure that enables misguided pro-police attitudes and normalizes such behavior.

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Karakatsanis is the founder of Civil Rights Corps, a nonprofit organization that has led litigation to free people from illegal jailing, provide funding for the most vulnerable people in society, and produced political education and narrative strategies to change society’s views on mass incarceration and family separation. Karakatsanis has authored two books, Usual Cruelty and Copaganda, which critiques “a special kind of propaganda employed by police, prosecutors and news media” that “stokes fear of police-recorded crime and distorts society’s responses to it.”

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The takeover of outlets like CBS and the Washington Post by some of the world’s richest people, with connections to the Trump administration, has obviously raised a lot discussion about how the mainstream media has been captured by right-wing forces. However, PBS, which has not undergone a sudden and distinct takeover, covered the ICE killing of Renee Nicole Good “shamefully,” in your words. Clearly, the framing of news stories to validate the carceral state and normalize police misconduct predates the latest, perhaps more egregious, moves by the new-look CBS and the Washington Post.

As far as I can tell, this is pretty standard media practice for as long as I’ve been following the news. When I started studying this and archiving it for my book, I was really focused on the more mainstream establishment media. I wasn’t trying to do a study of the right wing media like Fox News. I was trying to understand the role that the mainstream, or even sometimes, as it’s called, liberal media, talks about the institutions of government and repression. I don’t just mean institutions of government repression, or what I call the punishment bureaucracy which includes police, prosecutors, prisons, courts, etc., but also the multi-billion dollar industries that are parasitic on them, whether it’s the money bail industry or the private equity-owned prison telecom industry or the prison medical care industry or private prisons. ....................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/01/20/mainstream-media-helped-build-the-myth-of-law-enforcement/