This is a thread about how journalists decide what is “news” and what isn’t. Anyone shaping the news and anyone consuming the news should understand who decides what counts as news, how they decide it, and what determines what they say about it. Here, I ask a few questions:
This thread is inspired by the gap in what mainstream media treats as urgent and what are the greatest threats to human safety, well-being, and survival.
For example, air pollution kills *10 million people* each year and causes untold additional illness and suffering. It rarely features in daily news stories. Why?
Instead, daily news is dominated by “crime” stories. But even these are “crime” stories of a certain kind: they aren't stories about the many air pollution crimes. They are the kind of "crimes" publicized by police press releases, usually involving poor people.
Much of deadly U.S. air and water pollution is also criminal, but “law enforcement” chooses to ignore it, and thus so do most journalists.
Why is this important? What the media treats as urgent helps to determine what the public thinks is urgent. It shapes what (and who) we are afraid of.
A thought experiment: Imagine if every day for the last 25 years every newspaper and tv station had urgent “breaking news” stories and graphics about the *thousands of deaths the night before* from air/water pollution, climate change, or poverty?
Take the frenzy over “retail shoplifting” from big corporate stores, which has taken over local/national news. Same reporters don't cover the $137 million in corporate wage theft *every day,* including by the same companies whose press releases about shoplifting they now quote.
The media’s frenzy has led to emergency actions by many politicians, who are feeling intense political pressure to pass laws, assign thousands more police, increase police/prison budgets, and project an urgency they have *never* shown for wage theft: newsweek.com/california-gov…
Wage theft is more devastating than all other property crime combined. And unlike theft from big companies, wage theft is *by corporations* from workers, many of whom struggle to meet basic necessities of life. It makes people homeless and kids go without food and winter coats.
Did you know that mostly bank fraudulent overdraft fees amount to basically the same amount of property theft as all burglary, larceny, car theft, and shoplifting combined? Probably not, because the media doesn’t report on instances of overdraft fraud by banks every day.
If it’s hard to grasp the scope of the news’s silence on $50 billion wage theft epidemic, how can we grasp the scope of the news’s daily silence on the $1 trillion tax evasion epidemic by wealthy people? bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Viewed in terms of absolute property value and objective harm, this makes much of the media’s obsession with retail shoplifting from corporate chain stores look absurd.
The same is true across public health, banking, manufacturing, employment, consumer protection, tax, and environment: things that cause greatest suffering and threats to public safety—many of which are crimes—receive a fraction of the attention as what police report as “crimes.”
Most people don’t know, because "news" didn’t tell them, that fraud crimes by bankers killed tens of thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands of people become homeless each year because of illegal actions by landlords. Almost never reported each day. yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-puni…
So, who is deciding to cover shoplifting with “breaking news” urgency but not air pollution, wage theft, and fraud that leaves people and their children homeless and in poverty?
The stakes are enormous. The world is careening toward extinction level events and millions are already dying from preventable causes that most people in the U.S. do not treat with urgency.
It’s hard to think of something more important than understanding the information-spreading apparatus that creates this gap between perception and reality.
Most people setting these agendas in the media are caring people committed to helping people understand the world. The NYT slogan is “all the news that’s fit to print.” The WaPo: “Democracy dies in the darkness.” How did such a gap between reality and "the news" develop?
Here are a few questions worth asking, and I hope you’ll add more:
Do the social and economic circles of journalists determine what they think is newsworthy?
Are there habits and customs relating to where journalists look for information, who their sources are, and who has the money to publicize things to journalists that determine what is considered news?
Are there professional economic incentives, racial and class biases, and jingoistic ideologies that shape *what harms* to *which people* count as important enough to be breaking news, or news at all?
What role does corporate ownership and consolidation of media companies play in determining what is covered and how urgently it is covered?
THREAD. Something must be said about the New York Times. We are in the midst of a full-blown fascist takeover, and the NYT let one of its most dishonest reporters publish an article today full of misinformation arguing for massive new investments in police and surveillance.
The thesis of the article is that because American cops are so terrible at solving murder (and getting much much worse than they used to be), "experts" believe the U.S. must spend massively more money on hiring police and surveillance.
I have a chapter in my Copaganda book on how the news media cherry picks pro-police "experts"--a small group who are kind of like flat-earthers--and then tries to manufacture some kind of consensus. It's actually unbelievable when you lay it all out across outlets and articles.
THREAD. As I visit London next week for the UK launch of my book Copaganda, I have to say publicly how outrageous the mainstream British media’s crime coverage is. It’s like they’ve studied the worst aspects of U.S. news culture while taking performance-enhancing drugs.
This may seem comical to U.S. news consumers who lived through the fake “retail theft” panic, but British press has worked itself into a frenzy in 2025 using the same playbook. Some of it is funny, but the effects will be devastating for British society. Look at BBC:
Here are some other recent examples from a smorgasbord of UK copaganda about low-level theft: “Broken Britain.” “Industrial-scale crime.” “Shoplifting crime wave."
THREAD. The New York Times editorial on the New York City Mayor race is shameful. A lot of people have criticized its cowardice for refusing to endorse, but I want to highlight something deeper and more disturbing.
One main theme of faux-intellectual neoliberal propaganda in recent years is that we tried progressive policies, and those policies failed. As I discuss in my Copaganda book with lots of funny/disturbing examples, this NYT lie is one of the most pernicious lies in modern media:
The story goes: lefty policies to make society more equal, free, and ecologically sustainable are naive. Now that we've tried them with terrible results, we have no choice but to boost repression to manage inequality we cannot solve and to help oligarchs make society less equal.
THREAD: The assassinations in Minnesota highlight a dirty secret hardly ever mentioned in the news: U.S. has 1.1 million private police officers. There is an unprecedented footprint of privately organized violence that is doing all sorts of things most people have no idea about.
Many journalists and "experts" quoted in the news go out of their way in new stories to conceal the reach of the private security/policing industries, what interests are behind it, and what it means for the possibility of a democratic life.
In my Copaganda book, I tell the story of how pro-police scholars and journalists have worked to conceal from the public estimates of private police--from forces at universities like Harvard, to much of downtown Detroit, to DC metro, to smaller stuff like this shooter.
"I had been wondering whether profiting from fascist kidnapping and mass torture/deportation/death was right or wrong, but this philosopher told me it was ok if I give money to the ACLU" is among the best things I've ever consumed in mainstream media.
Few stories better capture modern policing than this one about a conspiracy of private corporate interests paying off-duty state troopers as part of a "shadow force" to cleanse downtown Nashville of homeless people using metal chains, cages, and violence.
It's great to see local news covering issues like this by reporter @JFinleyreports because it helps to expose the vast bulk of what police do: only 4% of their time is spent on "violent" crime, and much of it is done to make people money: wsmv.com/2025/05/29/sha…
But it's vital to understand this is not some egregious "bad apple" conspiracy particular to Tennessee or Nashville. It's important to understand that local policing looks like this in every large U.S. city, regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans are in control.