The Cui bono behind 2021 coverage of shoplifting
Commonplace book
"... an enduring, decades-long trend: fluctuations in news coverage of police-reported crimes are not determined primarily by police-reported crime rates. Instead, they are more related to political occurrences, campaigns, and agendas. Public safety `news' surges when someone *wants police-reported crime to be news*....
"In the summer of 2021, a right-wing media personality posted a twenty-one second video of a shoplifting incident at Walgreens in San Francisco with the hashtag #noconsequencea and tagging the local district attorney. The video was posted amid a public relations push by Walgreens to spin the news about its pre-planned store closures, as well as a political campaign by police unions, far-right media, and billionaires trying to recall the progressive district attorney in San Francisco.Eah of these groups sought to drive fear around retail thefts for their own reasons, and mainstream news quickly adopted their viewpoints, running thousands of stories about shoplifting. These stories, with their message about the need for more enforcement and imprisonment, fueled the reactionary backlash against racial and social justice campaigns seeking to reduce the size and power of the police bureaucracy. And the news coverage also served the interests of real estate investors and commercial retail companies eager to use police to clear out neighborhoods for gentrification and to socialize corporate security costs.
"Journalists at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) did an analysis and found that, within twenty-eight days of being posted, this single shoplifting video spawned 309 separate articles about the Walgreens incident. It was difficult to consume news in the U.S. without confronting this story in some format. At the same time, the researchers found not a single article about a multi-million-dollar wage-theft settlement that Walgreens paid to its California employees."
- Alex Karakatsanis (2025). copaganda: how police and the media manipulate our news. The New Press, 30-31.
Speaking of FAIR and Walgreens, would you look here: "Update since original publication: On January 5, 2023, Walgreens' chief financial officer walked back many of the company's previous claims about retail theft, stating that Walgreens' `shrink rate' (the retail industry’s term for inventory or money lost to theft, fraud, or error) actually declined in 2022. His direct quote was `Maybe we cried too much last year. We’re stabilized [and] quite happy with where we are.' The National Retail Federation also retracted its claim that losses due to shrink totaled $45 billion in 2021."
Here's a link to Carolyn Said's expose of Walgreens's motives, in the S.F. Chronicle.
Here's a link to an NPR broadcast on the effort to remove San Francisco's progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin from office and other progressive DAs.
Here's a link to FAIR's reporting and accounting.
If press agents and other publicists had no news-generating power there would probably be fewer of them.
It's worthwhile for news-consumers to wonder a bit about burgeoning stories, especially when/if these paper immense amounts of coverage territory.
Furthermore, temporal planning horizons must be extended.
Photo: A Walgreens store that closed in early 2025, one of many branches to close around that time. By Mx. Granger - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=163498479