And the 2018 Izzy Award will be shared between four investigative reporters: The Intercept’s Lee Fang and Sharon Lerner, Truthout staff reporter Dahr Jamail and City Lights author Todd Miller. Sharon Lerner won for her reporting on corporate pollution, including from the chemical giant DuPont; Dahr Jamail for his work on climate change and the U.S. military; Todd Miller for his new book on climate refugees, “Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security”; and Lee Fang for his investigative reporting on money and politics in the Trump era. This is Lee Fang speaking recently on Democracy Now! about how gun manufacturers are targeting young people, even amid the rise of an unprecedented youth-led movement for gun control.
Lee Fang: “There’s new analysis from the gun industry showing that young people are not buying guns like older generations for hunting. They’re mostly kind of emulating video game culture. You know, they’re going to gun stores, buying targets of vampires and zombies, and going to the gun range and buying really sophisticated weapons, lots of ammunition. This is really, as one gun industry executive said, the Xbox generation that they’re trying to target. So, even as there’s a new youth-led student movement calling for gun control, this is coming at a time when the gun industry is hoping to grow their market share by selling more guns to young people.”
The Izzy Award is presented by the Park Center for Independent Media and named for legendary dissident journalist I.F. Stone.