The Subtle Copaganda of ‘The Legend of Korra’
By: Alex Mell-Taylor
Tags: Equality, The Legend Of Korra, Netflix, Social Justice, Culture

Korra is not a police officer. She is a kickass bender from the Southern Water Tribe who spends most of her time butting heads against authority figures such as President Raiko (Spencer Garrett), Chief of Police Lin Beifong, and Councilmember Tarrlok. She went against everyone's better judgment and opened the portal to the spirit world, and she has never been shy to assert her voice above her peers.

By Avatar Kyoshi’s war fan, how can this show be anything close to copaganda?

When we talk about copaganda, it’s important to distinguish between the word and the phenomenon it describes. The term is a portmanteau of the words “cop” and “propaganda ” We can find traces of it stretching back over a decade in liberal activist circles. The word generally describes media that favors the police and depicts them as a supreme good in our society. This type of media existed long before the term itself and it’s problematic because it ultimately ends up creating an ideology of “Law and Order” that flattens the nuances surrounding crime and justice.

Cops are good. Criminals are bad. End of story.

We have a widespread belief in America that this simplistic ideology is not only necessary, but that it is the only thing that stands in the way between us and “evil.” When, for example, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, then-Governor Ronald Reagan blamed the assassination on the Civil Rights Movements’ campaign of civil disobedience. He remarked on the day of Martin Luther King Jr’s funeral that it was “…a great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order and people started choosing which laws they’d break.’’

The desire for “Law and Order” is something so baked into our society that it infects nearly every aspect of the zeitgeist. As you are probably well aware, there is a popular crime genre franchise literally called Law & Order (1990–2010) with four spinoffs (Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999 — present), Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2001–2011), Law & Order: Trial by Jury (2005–2006), Law & Order: True Crime (2017; hiatus)) that all total over 1,174 episodes and counting, with two more shows in the works (Law & Order: Organized Crime and Law & Order: Hate Crimes). Nearly every episode of Law & Order involves a hardboiled group of detectives locking up a criminal in 45 minutes or less to avenge a victim who has been wronged, which dovetails very succinctly into our working definition of copaganda — the police catch the bad guys, and that makes everyone safe.

Law & Order is by no means an anomaly in popular culture. Crime shows reached their lowest point in the 2019–2020 television season by making up only one-fifth of all scripted shows on network TV. These shows have historically been told from a white perspective (e.g., they have little or no minority representation on screen or in the writer’s room or directors chair) and that biases their overall construction.

This problem with perspective is a trend dating back over half a century. The NBC show Dragnet (1951–1959), for example, was a widely influential police procedural during the 1950s that began every episode telling its viewers that the story they were about to see was true. The show worked closely with the LAPD to obtain that veneer of authenticity, a partnership that led to police officers' depiction as objective dispensers of justice. As the character Frank Smith says in episode 28, season 7 (The Big War):

“You know Joe, you have to be absolutely factual in your reports: factual, brief, and accurate.”

Even though such a characterization glossed over a more brutal history of racism and corruption within the department, it quickly became the standard for most procedurals. It’s nowadays difficult to find a show that doesn’t try to depict police officers' heroics in the crime-show genre through the lens of authenticity. Law & Order likewise began every episode with a similar theme that told their viewers that they were seeing the stories of investigators and prosecutors. We even see the relatively progressive buddy cop show Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2013 — present) depict most cops as good people inching towards incrementalist reform. As Captain Holt (Andre Braugher) states in episode 3 of season 3 (Boyle’s Hunch):

“All the headlines are about the bad cops, but there are good cops, too.”

This trend of portraying the police as “the good guys” who solve society’s most heinous problems has been going on for a long time, and yet, it doesn’t align with reality. We have seen from multiple reports on policing across the United States that most officers' time is not spent solving “serious” crimes, but more mundane activities such as traffic and noncriminal calls. When officers are involved with solving rape and murder incidents, it doesn’t necessarily lead to the heroics of your favorite crime show. In a recent article in the New York Times, four victims of sexual assault discussed how police downplayed and dismissed their claims. Other reporting has sadly revealed that cops themselves often use their position of privilege to commit sexual assault.

This more complicated reality is why progressives and leftists routinely categorize shows such as Law & Order, Dragnet, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine as copaganda. These shows maintain a fantasy that actively gets in the way of our discussions on justice. There might genuinely be people in police forces who believe they are doing good. Still, they end up enforcing a system that routinely punishes poor people of color for minor offenses. In fact, recent reporting from The Atlantic and NPR indicates that cops who try to hold their fellow officers accountable are disproportionately censured or even fired. Cop shows bury this reality by making people believe in a version of policing that is a lie.

The copaganda label doesn’t stop and end with TV series’ either, and can expansively be applied to any media that uncritically glorifies police officers as heroes. News articles that overemphasize police officers' perspectives are also commonly placed into this category, as well as social media posts that depict police officers positively for the sake of clout.

Again, copaganda is about the false mindset of glorifying our society's watchmen without criticizing their authority. Its impact is far-reaching and has pervaded our very notion of what a hero means.

We exist in a moment in pop culture where a lot of divergent trends (e.g., our ideas of crime, heroics, and nerd culture) have collided together in film and television to say something unique about heroes. Some of the highest-grossing films of all time are superhero films (e.g., Avengers: Endgame, and Avenger’s: Infinity War). A lot of these cultural products are rooted in source material that intersects with or, in some cases, directly embraces copaganda.

Many of us are familiar with the two largest comic book publishers in the United States — DC and Marvel — but what might be lost to history for some fans is that many comic-books originally started in the crime genre. DC is actually short for Detective Comics, and during the comic-book boom of the 1940s and early 1950s, crime stories were some of the highest-selling stories. Popularity in this genre has since wained, in part due to regulation and a reactionary backlash. Children and adults alike are now far more likely to read stories of caped crusaders than grizzled detectives. The DNA of that history, however, remains in the stories that we read.

When we look at Batman and Spiderman, they often have a close working relationship with the police. The game Spiderman (2018) on the PlayStation 4, for example, depicts hero Peter Parker (aka Spiderman) idolizing the police so much that he has a goofy alter ego called “Spider Cop.” Superheroes, in many ways, embody the values copaganda says our cops should possess. They are frequently righteous defenders who defeat bad guys for the betterment of society. This connection caused Eliana Dockterman to write in Time:

…most superhero stories star straight, white men who either function as an extension of a broken U.S. justice system or as vigilantes without any checks on their powers. Usually, they have some sort of tentative relationship with the government…And even when superheroes function outside the justice system, they’re sometimes idolized by police because they are able to skirt the law to “get the job done.”

Many of our most fantastic heroes can sadly fall within the realm of copaganda, including Avatar Korra.