Name: Tatsuya King

Social Justice Group: 2018-2019, Freedom of the Press

Date of Fieldwork: January 14, 2019

Name of Organization: The Post

Person (people) with whom I met and their job titles: No one

Type of Fieldwork: Watching a movie

What I did:

We watched a movie called The Post, which depicts events related to the Pentagon Papers that eventually lead to Watergate.

What I learned:

I learned a lot about the risks that people working in Washington Post had to take in order to get information to the public. If it went wrong, they all could have lost their jobs and the Washington Post would have been completely ruined. I also learned the amount of stress that Katherine Graham(Meryl Streep) had to go through in order to make the decision to publish. If it didn’t work, everybody’s biases about women in the workplace and her would be confirmed. If it weren’t for people who were willing to take these kinds of risks, a lot of corrupt systems and people would go unnoticed.

What I learned about Social Justice “work” and/or Civil and Human rights “work” from this fieldwork:

I learned that taking action is like a leap of faith because it could go very wrong but if it goes right, it could help a lot of people. Taking action also takes a lot of hard work. The people in The Post had to rigorously go through thousands of pages of documents just so that they could publish some papers. This is why many people don’t want to take action, but it is because of the few people that are brave enough that are society can improve.