‘Freedom Table With Rashad Robinson’ Takes Aim At Copaganda
Welcome to the first episode of Freedom Table with Rashad Robinson. Every month, Rashad Robinson and a panel of guests will discuss the issues facing Black Americans during these very strange, incredibly tumultuous times.
This month’s panel includes actor and founder of BLD PWR Kendrick Sampson; journalist and professor Eric Deggans; journalist Josie Duffy Rice; and the Black List founder Franklin Leonard. The focus of this month’s discussion is on crime shows.
Listen, I’m not going to judge anyone who enjoys watching a good crime drama. Law & Order and all its various spinoffs were a mainstay in my house growing up. Heat, Miami Vice, and To Live and Die in LA are among some of my favorite movies. While I do have a fondness for the genre, it’s important to acknowledge how it’s been weaponized into PR for policing.
“These shows project the idea that the interest of the system is in justice and that the goal is to determine the truth,” Josie Duffy Rice says. “That is a fundamental misunderstanding, right? The goal is convictions; that is the incentive that drives the system.”
It’s easy to say that creators should just tell truthful stories about how messy and, quite frankly, unjust our justice system can be. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. “One of the biggest conflicts any writer has is that they’re ultimately trying to serve two audiences,” Franklin Leonard says during the discussion. “You’re trying to serve the end user, the person who’s going to be on their couch, or on their phone, or in a theater and watch the thing. But in order to even get access to that audience, you’re trying to serve an audience of people who will pay to make the thing.”
The last three years have seen more and more media companies consolidate. 2025 alone saw Paramount be bought out by David Ellison and his billionaire father, Larry, who are both very close with President Donald Trump. Paramount owns CBS, and we’ve already seen how Ellison’s changes to CBS News and 60 Minutes have been favorable to Trump. If billionaires can manipulate the news in their favor, it should come as no surprise that something as innocuous as a crime drama could essentially be designed as copaganda.
“I do think that there’s an audience for an alternative, I’ll say that,” Kendrick Sampson says. “I do think that people are really interested in when tragedies, when harm happens in a community, how the community gets through it. How a family gets through it. It doesn’t have to be focused on law enforcement to get to whatever the problem is.”
Leonard acknowledges that while racism has always been profitable for Hollywood, he cites a study he participated in with McKenzie & Co. that found anti-Black discrimination is resulting in Hollywood leaving $10 billion on the table. At a time when the box office is stagnating, and media companies are competing with the likes of TikTok and Fortnite for people’s attention, maybe they should spend less time capitulating to a deeply unpopular president and more time giving audiences what they want.
This is a discussion everyone should watch.
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