The Throwaway: Copaganda and the News

Recently, while back in the United States for a couple of months, I was staying at my aunt Abbie’s house. She pays an exuberant cost for cable — the price these cable companies charge their still remaining customers, which mostly consist of the elderly, should be considered nothing less than thievery. Three things I noticed were:

1. Over 3/4ths of commercials were pharmaceutical-related to some degree.

2. Every local news network sold fear to its audience, drastically increasing or blatantly fabricating details of statistics and information. National news networks did the same thing but in a partisan manner, engineering propaganda in a way that would be digestible based on what political party their audience took a liking to.

3. Almost every show was in some way a form of copaganda — directly taking ideas for their episodes from whatever event was highlighted in the news at the time of writing the season.

Between points 2 and 3, this has led to the perpetual cycle of people watching the news and becoming afraid, watching fictional copaganda to validate their fears, and then leading them to turn back on the news to see a piece on something they had seen previously in some televised drama, only to feel both entities validate each other.

Bombastic Fiction

My aunt’s three favorite shows on network television are FBI and its spinoffs, SWAT, a show that looks to humanize its characters based on the "not all cops are bad" narrative, and 911, a show that is jam-packed with insane scenarios and action sequences that most action movies from the 80s would say, “Okay, let's cut it back a bit; it’s starting to not be believable.” In a three-episode special of 911, the main protagonist, Officer Athena Grant, played by Angela Bassett, and her husband, Fire Chief Bobby Nash, played by Peter Krause, are on a cruise and, in the span of this arc, take down an offshore crypto scam operation ( this story was obviously built on the news of Sam Bankman-Fried), take down a gang of Mexican pirates/terrorists (the great immigrant scare), and also rescue a family after surviving a boat capsizing in a storm (this episode was probably written after anyone of those cruise ships shut down in the middle of the sea a few years ago). Not only this, but in the episode, canonically days before the cruise trip, Officer Grant, Nash, and the rest of the cast survive the collapse of an overpass. One of the supporting characters, Chimney, played by Kenneth Choi, survived the collapse of an ambulance that he was in during this episode while in the process of saving a woman and having an artery severed. In other episodes Chimney survived a rebar through his head, getting stabbed by his girlfriend’s stalking ex, all while going through a mental psychosis through the streets of Los Angeles and falling and getting stuck in a chimney. Hence his character's name. All of this happens, and oftentimes there is no hint of it in the following episodes. Mostly, this isn’t an attack on the copaganda aspect of network television; this is just a critique on the writing of the shows of which my aunt likes to call “shoot 'em up, bang bangs.”

Fallacies in Copaganda

SWAT, on the other hand, is not as innocent. Out of all the shows I have seen that fit the scope of copaganda, this show has been the cornerstone of the "cops need forgiveness because they are people too" narrative. SWAT is filled with Shemar Moore’s character, Daniel “Hondo” Harrison, who my aunt cant stand, constantly at odds with his family on the systemic racism of the LAPD, which it seems Hondo does not see or understand, or rather, that he feels he, as a Black police officer, can change the system from the inside, highlighting the reform rhetoric that in the real world leads to police departments getting more funding after they kill an innocent person (probably Black) on camera. The show is filled with Shemar’s character going against his community and telling them what needs to happen from a cop’s perspective, instead of listening to what they need. The show even went the distance of having Hondo marry a woman who works at the community center, along with two white officers moving into an East LA neighborhood, both to show that “police are part of the neighborhood too” and worth love. Where the show is really foul is in its episode-by-episode situations that the team finds itself in with the criminals they are hunting. I don't think I have seen a single episode in the dozens I have watched at my aunt's house that was not based on some story that at one time or another was on the news. This show banks on the news having a story about something horrific, like a school shooting or an alleged Latin gang taking over a small town in middle America. Both of which SWAT has taken advantage of and crafted stories around to a high degree. This show banks on the fear the common American feels while watching the news, so when they tune into the show, it gives them some sort of legitimacy to what they are showing. What the show gets right in many ways is the hyper-bro-ness of right-wing spaces (yes, any police department, no matter where, is fundamentally right-wing). The language they use and attitudes towards each other, the fact that they have all of this boxing equipment, but I have yet to see any character throw a proper punch, the fitness and workout culture, the single token girl characters that are interchangeable through the seasons. The bromances between the characters and the show’s obsession with the “brotherliness” of the LAPD SWAT department. All of these things are giving homoerotic

How can you hate SVU?

When it comes to shows such as “Law & Order,” especially “Special Victims Unit,” the criticism of copaganda becomes increasingly harder to participate in. How can you criticize a show that revolves around catching heinous criminals, especially rapists and child molesters? I would argue against that sentiment. I would say, “How could we as a society allow producers to make money off of a show that so actively exploits the victims of real-life sexual violence by stealing their real-life stories of being raped, molested, or kidnapped for the sake of making good television?” Now, I love Detective Benson and Stabler as much as the next American, and I am always interested in seeing the single three-sentence line that Ice-T is going to recite, although he does have a more prominent role nowadays, it seems. But there is something to be said about the fact that SVU and the other Law and Order shows take these stories almost down to the finest detail and import them into their program, sometimes only changing the names of the people involved. You pair this with the fact many people watch the news predominantly for the shock and fear value; it’s clear and obvious that people would also watch a more dramatized and better-produced version of it when it comes out in six months on SVU, or maybe in a year’s time on one of those true crime documentaries, which is in many ways peak copaganda.

Copaganda V.S. the Truth

I must say I fall victim to copaganda as well. I truly and honestly believe the first season of the show “True Detective” is probably the best thing I have ever watched on television. I could try and play into why this show is different — the show merely uses police to progress a narrative of darkness and sinisterness that plagues towns all around the country. Yes, that would be true, but the show also does a hell of a job at making the viewer believe police work is hyper-individual and that one or two guys doing their job right can make a change or at least crack their decades-long case. This has proven to not be true in the real world more times than it's been proven to be true. Oftentimes, someone getting to the bottom of a cold case isn’t a cop to begin with, but instead some sort of investigative journalist, like Michelle McNamara, who, after the case went cold on the Golden State Killer (a name she coined), came up with suspects investigators had never even thought of, did hundreds of thousands of hours of research, went to each house of alleged witnesses, and talked to independent investigators. She did a lot of the work in helping to find who actually committed this murder. Even the victims name her as being equally important in this case. Mostly anyone who has dealt with police will tell you that after a case goes cold, police are off to the next case. Unless they can lock a whole lot of people up in a flimsy RICO¹ case that wouldn’t stand up on a windy day if it weren’t for a racist judicial system. And anyone within the police system that would try to go against his fellow police and challenge what he is seeing could possibly be subjected to the Serpico treatment.

Copaganda outside of Cop shows

It doesn’t stop here though. Copaganda thrives in children’s Television and film too. Marvel movies are filled with “Villians” that have practical and just points to why they may do the things they do. Yet, the hero still comes to “save” the day and save the fascist framework from being taken down by the alleged “ villain”. We all know that Killmonger was right in Black Panther. How can the world’s strongest black nation sit in isolation and prosper while the rest of the black word suffers and they do nothing about it? Yes, in the end T’challa decides to open up Wakanda to the rest of the world but only after Killmonger is killed due to the writers having to make the guy who has a great idea the villain because his means were not deemed acceptable by the ones in power. Who sounds like the real Black Panter in this scenario? Do you remember the villain in the original Blade runner, Roy Batty. His whole purpose for revolting was because an entire race of sentient beings, that he so happened to be a part of, with thoughts and feelings, were being forced to be a slave class because they were clones. If that isn’t a reason to revolt than I don’t know what is, but he was killed and made the film’s antagonist because of the way he conducted himself. These films are Copaganda to the most high, because it conditions you to believe if you fight the system, you will be killed for it and you should either kindly go along and submit to what is happening or if you are to protest, do it within the perimeters that the authoritarian state deem acceptable.

One of my favorite internet theories is that Yoda and the Jedi are war criminals and that the clones start as childhood soldiers and are faced with living similar lives as the clones in Bladerunner. Only instead of being a slave labor class they are a slave soldier class, destined to die on the battle field fighting the Sith, till order 66 is enacted and they are forced to kill Jedi in the name of the Sith. If you have a problem with this theory, ask yourself: Have you ever seen a clone actively sign up to be a soldier, or did they get crafted in a lab and be raised to do so without any legitimate way out?

Children’s shows can also be Copaganda. Shows like PAW Patrol are dangerous. Shows like this condition children to believe police conduct themselves in a way that is very foreign to the way that police conduct themselves in real life. The real horrid thing about PAW patrol is that it conditions the child viewer to blindly follow state appointed rules. If you want to be good you have to follow the rules no matter what. The problem with that is, this is not always the case in the real world. Now we can argue that because it is a children’s show it lacks the complexities of the real world because children are not yet intelligent enough to understand said complexities at the age of the Paw Patrol targeted audience. I would say to some degree yes, but it should be noted that if this is true than packing each episode with material geared towards keeping up with status quo and never questioning authority would be conditioning children at a young age to never develop that critical lens, or making it that much difficult to do so when they start coming of age.

The News

Every night around six and again at eleven, the local networks work in unison to instill terror into the hearts and minds of the American people. These broadcasts, although containing different actors, consist of all the same characters regurgitating all of the same lines. This show we have come to call the local news, or in other words the biased, propaganda intake hour. The news claims to take an unbiased, bipartisan approach to what it broadcasts, but oftentimes has a very right-leaning voice when it comes to issues that matter. Take, for instance, more recently in the news, the rhetoric and talking points focused around a “rising migrant issue,” the way the news reports on white mass shooters as “conflicted” or “known in the community as a good father” as opposed to the way they report on Black people who commit crimes as the litmus for what a Black person is, or worse, they don't even mention the person, just misconstrued statistics.

The entire purpose of the news, whether it be local or national, is to be “good TV.” In other words, they only exist to get viewership. If it be through selling a lie about the danger you may be facing or an entire news segment dedicated to a viral online cat video, the news and its producers don't care so much about the accuracy of what they say, but the emotional impact it has on its audiences so that they will tune in every day, sometimes twice a day. As long as they uphold even the smallest crumb of alleged “journalistic credibility,” no one will call them out on their bullshit. This is why most things on the news are not necessarily a lie, but they are not necessarily the truth either. It exists in this entertainment realm; I am in the mind of thinking, though, if it is sold as the truth and it isn’t, this is harmful and false propaganda and should be treated as such.

National News Networks

If you tune into one of the major national news networks, things take a turn in some regard; there really isn’t a single leftist network in existence. Fox, The First, and NewsMax are right-wing to the point of being, on many occasions, deep alt-right conspiracy bubbles, while CNN and MSNBC operate at a moderate Democratic neoliberal level at best. In reality, both sets of networks only care about their investors and exist to corner two opposing corners of a very narrow political spectrum. If you remember during the election, Trump and his cronies at Fox would consistently call Harris a “radical” to try and strike fear into moderate Republicans and Democrats to not vote for her. The reality is any radical leftist will tell you there isn't a single radical bone in Harris’s body. Her policies are liberal at best, but the average American doesn't know that because of what they are conditioned to believe through the news outlets they watch. We can’t forget the fact that Democratic politicians, almost in total, were pro-Israel when every radical leftist in the country recognizes them as a genocide machine. The politicians are bought, and because of the way the news networks are set up, so are they.

Depending on who your network provider is or the source of where you can get information, there is a slight chance you may be accustomed to consuming international news media. If it be through one of the big US networks having a subsidiary network dedicated to international news, or maybe at least access to the BBC, these networks do not go unscathed either. I remember in the following days of October 7th, the reporters on the BBC were hard-hitting on the Israelis, with each interviewer asking their Israeli guest hard-hitting questions and engaging in skepticism towards the Israeli fallacies that were being perpetrated at the time. By the fourth or fifth day, it was clear someone from above had put a stop to that. There was no longer a critical lens shining on Israel at the BBC. It, by that point and time, had become a fellow spoke in the wheel that powers the Israeli propaganda machine in the West. The issue is that news networks still have to report back to big brother and keep the voice of the network in favor of its investors. This becomes especially heinous when you consider international news sells you on the same lie the local and national news does, except it is geared around a foreign “them” versus a domestic “us.” So…… Unifying? Well, no, but to some degree, yes. But do you really want to live in fear of a nonexistent foreign invasion? Do you really want to fear for your pet's life because someone on the news told you (checks notes*) Haitians are coming into the country and eating them?

So, what can you do if you don’t want to be influenced by copaganda and a corrupt news cycle? For one, you can be more intentional about what and where you consume your media. If you enjoy copaganda, realize the brainwashing it does and try to combat that with your own research and understanding of what they are discussing in the show. As far as the news, I recommend networks like Al Jazeera for international stories, but I am sure they have their own issues if I am remembering correctly. On the local front, if you live in the Pennsylvania tri-state area and have cable, I came across a network called “Free Speech TV” where they have shows and correspondents that report on and talk about issues from a standpoint of not trying to please their investors. If you are outside of the area, I imagine a simple Google search would do the trick. Sites like groundnews.com are a great tool to find news that comes from all over the spectrum with the ability to see which way the publication leans. The truth is, if you want to find information, it takes a little bit of work, but this is good work. Remember, it is a good thing to figure out and know how to think instead of being told what to think every night at six and again at eleven.

1. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act is a United States federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization.