In 2022, I appeared on a Sunday morning news show in Los Angeles amid an increase in local news stories about theft. I pointed out patterns in which news stations devoted more coverage to low-level theft than to other behavior that causes more suffering, including larger forms of theft.
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The anchor incredulously asked me why the news should not be covering it when a man in a Ferrari is robbed and has his Rolex taken in Beverly Hills, which he explained was “one of the most affluent areas.” Referencing that anecdote and retail theft by groups of teenagers in clothing stores, he said, “I think we have an obligation to cover that, don’t you think?” The answer to his question depends on what one thinks to be the purpose of news.
Air pollution kills ten million people each year and causes untold additional illness and suffering. It kills at least 100,000 people in the United States alone annually—about five times the number of police-reported homicides. But it rarely features in daily news stories. Police and prosecutors ignore pollution, much of which is criminal, and so do most journalists.
For example, federal prosecutors charged twenty-three people with environmental offenses in 2020, and they charged more than 23,000 people with drug offenses in the same period. Daily news stories focus on the kind of legal violations publicized by police and prosecutor press releases, usually involving poor people.
Why is this important? Because what the news treats as urgent affects what we think is urgent. It shapes what (and who) we are afraid of. It helps dictate what we demand from our political system, and from each other.
Imagine if, every day for the last four years, every newspaper and TV station had “breaking news” stories and graphics about the thousands of deaths the night before from water pollution, eviction, lack of access to medication and health care, or poverty.
Imagine if, every day for the last four years, every newspaper and TV station had “breaking news” stories and graphics about the thousands of deaths the night before from water pollution, eviction, lack of access to medication and health care, or poverty. Or debilitating injuries caused by workplace safety violations?
Or tens of thousands of child labor violations? What about the death, destruction, cancer, infertility, and other harms to humans, animals, and ecosystems from criminal acts of industrial littering in cities across the U.S. every day?
Imagine a daily news segment on your local TV station called “Bad Landlord of the Day,” where the anchor reported on the worst building code violations that government regulators document each day. Imagine a “Bad Employer of the Week” segment for wage-theft violations that local, state, and national regulators find every day. Or a “Bad Insurer of the Week” story about fraudulent denials of health care benefits that lead people to suffer and die.
Imagine if reporters reported stories every day from people who could not pay for diapers or food because of illegal lending practices? Or stories from nurses, doctors, or teachers about threats to well-being they see every day through lack of investment in health and education infrastructure?
If we were bombarded with daily and nightly news stories and press conferences about harmful legal violations and broader threats that cause far more harm than the kinds of legal violations reported in the daily news, how would that change political discourse and how would it change what investments we prioritize as a society?
Consider, for example, the frenzy over “retail theft” that took over local and national news after the uprisings over police violence in 2020. The same editors and reporters who wrote thousands of stories about low-level shoplifting from chain stores chose for years not to cover the estimated $137 million in corporate wage theft that happens every day, including by the same companies whose press releases about shoplifting they quoted.
The news media’s obsession with shoplifting led to emergency actions by politicians across the U.S. to address the “crisis” of retail theft through hundreds of millions of dollars in new punishment investments. Politicians felt intense political pressure to pass laws, hire and assign thousands more police officers, and increase “enforcement” budgets to tackle a supposed “wave” of retail theft, even as police-recorded theft crimes were going down. These politicians and journalists nonetheless projected an urgency they have never shown for wage theft.
Measured in dollars lost, total estimated wage theft is more devastating than all other police-reported property crime combined. And, unlike theft from big retail stores, wage theft is a crime committed by people with a lot of money against workers, many of whom struggle to meet their basic needs.
In a society in which access to health care depends on having the means to pay for it, wage theft can mean not having enough money to buy insulin or asthma medication. It is among the most significant and common crimes in our society.
What about the 28,260 to 412,000 deaths caused every year in the U.S. because of toxic lead exposure? When a bombshell investigation by The Guardian revealed in 2022 that a huge percentage of faucets in Chicago, the third largest city in the U.S., contained unsafe levels of lead for children, the story was not covered at all by CNN, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Washington Post, ABC News, CBS News, or NBC News.
Intentional action, incompetence, and corruption leading to delays in lead abatement is almost never covered in the news, local or national. As a result, cities like Chicago have exhibited little urgency to fix the problem: the current pace of lead abatement in Chicago would not finish the project for a thousand years.
Or, to take another example, in many years fraudulent overdraft fees charged by banks total about the same as all burglary, larceny, car theft, and shoplifting combined. But the news doesn’t report on anecdotes of overdraft fraud crimes by bankers every day.
Similarly, it is hard to grasp the scope of the news’s daily silence on the estimated $1 trillion in yearly tax evasion—this is 1,672 times the value of all U.S. robberies combined. What about the estimated $830 billion in other forms of corporate fraud each year?
Addressing financial crimes could significantly alter the distribution of wealth, the array of life opportunities, and physical safety for hundreds of millions of human beings. But neither the police nor the media pay much attention to them, and they certainly don’t foment panic about them.
But it is vital to be cognizant of what kinds of harm—by whom, against whom, in which moments, and to what end—are treated as “news.”
The same principle applies across public health, banking, manufacturing, employment, consumer protection, taxation, and the environment: the things that cause the greatest suffering and threaten safety for the largest number of people—many of which are crimes—receive a fraction of the attention that reporters devote to the things police press releases publicize as crimes.
Most people don’t know, because the “news” didn’t tell them the night before, that bankers’ fraud crimes likely killed tens of thousands of people during the 2008 financial crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people become homeless each year because of illegal evictions by landlords. Almost none of this is reported each day even though there could easily be a housing-court beat reporter the same way many outlets assign a reporter to talk to police every day.
The same absence of urgently reported, daily anecdotal coverage applies to the great criminal littering epidemic: several trillion pieces of plastic are thrown illegally into our waterways each year, and they make their way into the bodies and bloodstreams of every living organism on the planet, with profound consequences for all of us. Are there local news anecdotes each day covering the “crime wave” of the intentional insertion of lead, mercury, cyanide, and cadmium into the ground?
Or the tens of billions of dollars in fraud crimes committed by entities supposed to be providing hospice care for terminally ill seniors? At most, each of these issues is covered in an occasional, hard-hitting piece of investigative journalism, and then the news cycle moves on. They are not considered daily news of continuing alarm over public safety.
None of this is to say that violent crime and property crime recorded by police doesn’t matter, or that we shouldn’t care about it. To the contrary, we should care about anything that harms people.
But it is vital to be cognizant of what kinds of harm—by whom, against whom, in which moments, and to what end—are treated as “news.” The news about public safety is a social and political creation that contains judgment calls at every turn, one that creates winners and losers and that could look different if we wanted it to.
So, who is deciding to cover each subsequent example of shoplifting with hourly, “breaking news” urgency, but not other legal violations that leave adults and children dying, sick, and in poverty? Who is shaping what makes us feel scared? Why are they doing it, and who benefits?
Identifying the gap between the reality of holistic safety and “the news” is the first step in understanding how so many people who care about creating a society that expands our collective safety end up prioritizing investments in a punishment bureaucracy that ignores the things that threaten us the most.
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Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News by Alec Karakatsanis is available via New Press.