This is an entire “news” article merely allowing San Jose police to repeat false talking points about “bail reform” in ways that are contrary to the scientific evidence about public health and safety and contrary to centuries of law. abc7news.com/san-jose-stree…
It could be news that the mayor and police chief of a major US city are caught misleading the public for political benefit, but instead this local reporter acts as their stenographer. Shameful.
Here is a thread with actual information in it about the issue:
Here is the (also bad) Fox story on the case. This example of following basic laws is not an important news story, other than reporters just printing police press releases. But, unlike ABC, Fox at least quoted another perspective criticizing the cops: ktvu.com/news/homicide-…
This dangerous piece with no contrary perspectives was “reported” by @DustinABC7. It’s shameful stuff, and an embarrassment to local journalists working hard to actually provide objective, helpful coverage about trump world.
this should have said "about the world," but i suppose the autocorrect to "trump" is fitting for this kind of evidence-free anti-science fearmongering from @DustinABC7. Let's see if he's open to doing another story with community voices who have views consistent with evidence.
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The level of ignorance among liberal pundits about surveillance technology, police violence, and authoritarianism is astonishing. Just no effort to understand important issues before commenting on them.
The idea that the problem with what ICE is doing now is that it lacks hundreds of millions of dollars for surveillance technology is utterly a wild thing for someone to utter in public. Just an incredible thing to focus liberal energy on.
THREAD. This week, the New York Times published a hagiography of a ruthless drug war prosecutor. I want to make a few important points about the most important kinds of misinformation that regularly appear in the New York Times and other mainstream news outlets.
First, something subtle. The below quote is a microcosm of the full article: it contains an assertion, reported as fact, that this prosecutor "was trying to make safer” one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York through mass human caging for drugs.
This statement of fact about her intentions is absurd—the people involved knew that mass incarceration had been disproven by as a means of reducing dangerous drug use or making anyone safer. Exactly the opposite was true: the policies were increasing violence, death, and lots of other suffering.
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.