Elaine Elinson, Media Relations

Elaine Elinson, a media relations advisor with the Equal Justice Society, has worked as an advocate for the civil rights community in California for more than two decades. From 1980 to 2002, Elinson served as the Public Information Director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and the editor of the ACLU News. She directed media and publicity campaigns on a wide variety of issues, including race and the death penalty, juvenile justice, reproductive rights, language rights, immigrants’ rights, racial profiling and the right to dissent. She has worked on national media campaigns (most recently the employment discrimination lawsuit against Abercrombie & Fitch) and statewide publicity campaigns on ballot initiatives on immigrants’ rights, affirmative action, reproductive freedom, juvenile justice and the rights of lesbians and gays.

Elinson is the author and/or editor of several popular ACLU publications, including We Have Rights Too…But What are They?, targeted for high school students, The Rights of Passage, a brochure for immigrants, Reaching for the Dream/Profiles in Affirmative Action, and The California DWB Report: Driving While Black or Brown. She is the former producer and host of the monthly Pacifica talk show “Taking Liberties;” and given seminars and trainings on media advocacy and public interest law at Stanford Law School, Hastings Law School and the U.C. Berkeley School of Journalism.
Elinson worked for Pacific News Service in California and Southeast Asia; her articles have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Village Voice, The Nation and numerous other publications. She is the co-author of the book Development Debacle: the World Bank in the Philippines, which was banned by the Marcos regime. She has been an organizer for the United Farm Workers and Friends of Nicaraguan Culture. Elinson has a degree from Cornell University in Asian Studies and has been awarded two fiction-writing residencies.

Updated: June 2003