> From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 01:39:20 -0500
> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Subject: Re: Contact Information, Etc. Re: Corn transcript
>
> At 6:24 PM -0500 11/21/02, DoreneFC at aol.com wrote:
>> Liza defines herself as a journalist whose job it is to report
>> things, not necessarily to agitate. Why is it her job as opposed to
>> some hypothetical horde of other activists either to motivate WWP /
>> IAC/ ANSWER toward self-examination or to "think like a socialist
>> entrepreneur?"
>
> There are journalists, and there are journalists -- journalists who
> stand outside a social movement on which they report, and journalists
> who stand inside it. (Just as there are lawyers who stand outside a
> social movement whose participants they defend, and there are lawyers
> who stand inside it.) I thought that Liza counted herself as among
> the latter, given her work -- especially her book _Students Against
> Sweatshops_, which she co-authored with United Students Against
> Sweatshops activists (Cf.
> <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Sweatshops.html>). If _Students
> Against Sweatshops_ isn't an instance of "advocacy journalism," what
> is?
Yes, certainly it is. But the role of journalists, even journalists inside movements like myself, is still very different from that of people who make flyers, announce events w/chalk etc. Our role is no more valuable nor less, but it is not the same. I sometimes consider writing about events before they happen to help publicize them -- and have in fact done this -- but the problem is most of the time this makes dull copy: events that have already happened make better stories. Like most people, my time is limited so I try to do what makes most sense for me to do, rather than do things that other people can do much more effectively than I can.
Liza