Liberation News Service (LNS) was a
New Left
The New Left was a broad political movement mainly in the 1960s and 1970s consisting of activists in the Western world who campaigned for a broad range of social issues such as civil and political rights, environmentalism, feminism, gay rights, g ...
, anti-war
underground press
The terms underground press or clandestine press refer to periodicals and publications that are produced without official approval, illegally or against the wishes of a dominant (governmental, religious, or institutional) group.
In specific rec ...
news agency
A news agency is an organization that gathers news reports and sells them to subscribing news organizations, such as newspapers, magazines and All-news radio, radio and News broadcasting, television Broadcasting, broadcasters. A news agency may ...
that distributed news bulletins and photographs to hundreds of subscribing underground, alternative and radical newspapers from 1967 to 1981. Considered the "
Associated Press
The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. newspa ...
" for the underground press, at its zenith the LNS served more than 500 papers.
Founded in
Washington, D.C.
)
, image_skyline =
, image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...
, it operated out of
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
for most of its existence.
Overview
According to former LNS staffers
Thorne Dreyer
Thorne Webb Dreyer (born August 1, 1945) is an American writer, editor, publisher, and political activist who played a major role in the 1960s-1970s counterculture, New Left, and underground press movements. Dreyer now lives in Austin, Texas, whe ...
and Victoria Smith, the Liberation News Service "was an attempt at a new kind of journalism — developing a more personalistic style of reporting, questioning
bourgeois
The bourgeoisie ( , ) is a social class, equivalent to the middle or upper middle class. They are distinguished from, and traditionally contrasted with, the proletariat by their affluence, and their great cultural and financial capital. They ...
conceptions of 'objectivity' and reevaluating established notions about the nature of news..."
[Dreyer, Thorne and Victoria Smith (1969),]
The Movement and the New Media," Liberation News Service
published at ''The Rag'' archives. They pointed out that LNS "provided coverage of events to which most papers would have otherwise had no access, and... put these events into a context, helping new papers in their attempts to develop a political analysis... In many places, where few radicals exist and journalistic experience is lacking, papers have been made possible primarily because LNS copy has been available to supplement scarce local material."
The total combined circulation of the LNS-member papers was conservatively estimated at 2 million.
History
Foundation
Liberation News Service was founded in the summer of 1967 by
Ray Mungo
Raymond Mungo (born 1946) is an American author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books. He writes about business, economics, and financial matters as well as cultural issues.
In the 1960s, he attended Boston University, where he served ...
and
Marshall Bloom after they were separated from the
United States Student Press Association
The United States Student Press Association (USSPA) was a national organization of campus newspapers and editors active in the 1960s. It held a national convention of college student newspaper staff each summer at a member college campus, and a n ...
and its
Collegiate Press Service
Collegiate Press Service (CPS) is currently the name of a commercial news agency supplying stories to student newspapers. Earlier organizations (now defunct) used the same or similar names in the past.
History of Earlier Organizations
The first ...
.
Operating out of a townhouse at 3 Thomas Circle which they shared with the ''
Washington Free Press
''The Washington Free Press'' was a biweekly radical underground newspaper published in Washington, DC, beginning in 1966, when it was founded by representatives of the five colleges in Washington as a community paper for local Movement people. I ...
'', the LNS soon released its inaugural
mimeographed
A mimeograph machine (often abbreviated to mimeo, sometimes called a stencil duplicator) is a low-cost duplicating machine that works by forcing ink through a stencil onto paper. The process is called mimeography, and a copy made by the pro ...
news packet.
With support from private donors and assistance from the nearby
Institute for Policy Studies
The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) is an American progressive think tank started in 1963 that is based in Washington, D.C. It was directed by John Cavanagh from 1998 to 2021. In 2021 Tope Folarin was announced as new Executive Director. ...
,
[ Young, Allen]
"Liberation News Service: A History,"
Liberation News Service (1990). they were soon joined by other young journalists, including
Allen Young
Sir Allen William Young, (12 December 1827 – 20 November 1915) was an English master mariner and explorer, best remembered for his role in Arctic exploration including the search for Sir John Franklin.
Early life
Allen Young was born at Tw ...
,
Marty Jezer Marty Jezer (November 21, 1940 – June 11, 2005) was a well-known activist and author. Born Martin Jezer and raised in the Bronx, he earned a history degree from Lafayette College. He was a co-founding member of the Working Group on Electoral ...
and photographer
David Fenton
David Fenton (born 1953) is the Chairman and founder of Fenton Communications, created in 1982 to promote issue-oriented public relations campaigns focusing on the environment, public health and human rights. Since founding the company, he pioneere ...
, sending out packets of articles and photographs on a twice-weekly schedule to underground newspapers across the U.S. and abroad.
Expansion
During this time the writings of
Thorne Webb Dreyer
Thorne Webb Dreyer (born August 1, 1945) is an American writer, editor, publisher, and political activist who played a major role in the 1960s-1970s counterculture, New Left, and underground press movements. Dreyer now lives in Austin, Texas, wh ...
— co-founder of the
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the county seat, seat and largest city of Travis County, Texas, Travis County, with portions extending into Hays County, Texas, Hays and Williamson County, Texas, Williamson co ...
, underground paper ''
The Rag
''The Rag'' was an underground newspaper published in Austin, Texas from 1966–1977. The weekly paper covered political and cultural topics that the conventional press ignored, such as the growing antiwar movement, the sexual revolution, gay l ...
'' — were widely distributed, appearing regularly in dozens of periodicals. Dreyer's coverage of the October 21, 1967,
March on the Pentagon
The March on the Pentagon was a massive demonstration against the Vietnam War on October 21, 1967. The protest involved more than 100,000 attendees at a rally by the Lincoln Memorial. Later about 50,000 people marched across the city to The Penta ...
– with its massive acts of
civil disobedience
Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal of a citizen to obey certain laws, demands, orders or commands of a government (or any other authority). By some definitions, civil disobedience has to be nonviolent to be called "civil". Hen ...
– was distributed by LNS and published around the world. The night before the march, Bloom, Mungo, and the other staffers convened a chaotic meeting in a Washington loft with underground press editors from around the country who were in town to cover the event; but they failed to reach an agreement to create a democratic structure in which LNS would be owned and run by its member papers.
Operating on their own with a volunteer staff of 12, Bloom and Mungo moved forward with ambitious plans for the expansion of LNS. In December 1967 they opened an international
Telex
The telex network is a station-to-station switched network of teleprinters similar to a Public switched telephone network, telephone network, using telegraph-grade connecting circuits for two-way text-based messages. Telex was a major method of ...
line to Oxford, England; and later that winter LNS merged with the
Student Communications Network (SCN), based in
Berkeley, California
Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and Emer ...
, which had its own nationwide Telex network with terminals in Berkeley, Los Angeles, New York, Ann Arbor, Ames, Iowa, Chicago, and Philadelphia, leased from
Western Union
The Western Union Company is an American multinational financial services company, headquartered in Denver, Colorado.
Founded in 1851 as the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company in Rochester, New York, the company chang ...
. The Student Communications Network was a project of the University Christian Movement, a liberal Protestant church organization described as "mostly concerned with political and social issues rather than Christian evangelization."
Opening of the New York office
By February 1968, LNS was becoming the hub for
alternative journalism in the United States, supplying the growing movement media with interpretive coverage of current events and reports on movement activities and the
Sixties counterculture. There were 150 underground papers and 90 college papers subscribing to LNS, with most subscribers paying (or at least being billed) $180 a year.
LNS took over the former SCN office in New York, which had just been opened by former
Columbia University
Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
graduate student George Cavalletto and others in a converted
Chinese restaurant
A Chinese restaurant is an establishment that serves a Chinese cuisine. Most of them are in the Cantonese cuisine, Cantonese style, due to the history of the Overseas Chinese, Chinese diaspora and adapted to local taste preferences, as in t ...
on Claremont Avenue in
Harlem
Harlem is a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, New York City. It is bounded roughly by the Hudson River on the west; the Harlem River and 155th Street (Manhattan), 155th Street on the north; Fifth Avenue on the east; and 110th Street (Manhattan), ...
. Walking by, Steve Diamond saw a brand new Telex machine sitting in an otherwise empty storefront and a sign seeking volunteers, and attended a meeting shortly afterward at which the New York staff was formed.
Around this time, ''Rag'' co-founder Thorne Dreyer left Austin to help build LNS' editorial collective in New York City.
Two months after it opened, the New York office became a central focus for LNS activity during the
Columbia University student uprising in April 1968, as a continual stream of bulletins going out over the Telex kept underground papers and radio stations across the country up-to-the-minute on the latest developments in the Columbia student strike. To young radicals across the country, it seemed as if the revolution had come.
Moving the headquarters to New York
Recognizing that New York was where the action was and running short on funds, Bloom and Mungo decided to relocate the national headquarters from the expensive townhouse office in D.C. to the large storefront space in New York, which Cavalletto was renting for only $200 a month. Bringing Allen Young,
Harvey Wasserman
Harvey Franklin Wasserman (born December 31, 1945) is an American journalist, author, democracy activist, and advocate for renewable energy. He has been a strategist and organizer in the anti-nuclear movement in the United States for over 30 years ...
,
Verandah Porche
Verandah Porche (born November 8, 1945) is a poet living in Guilford, Vermont.
Biography
Porche (born Linda Jacobs) attended public schools in Teaneck, New Jersey, graduated from Teaneck High School in 1963, and went on to Boston University, grad ...
, and some of the other Washington staff with them, along with Sheila Ryan of the ''
Washington Free Press
''The Washington Free Press'' was a biweekly radical underground newspaper published in Washington, DC, beginning in 1966, when it was founded by representatives of the five colleges in Washington as a community paper for local Movement people. I ...
'', they moved into the New York office.
A culture clash soon developed, however, between the headquarters staff and the already existing local staff in New York, which had been originally recruited by the Student Communications Network, and who had been running their own affairs up to that point. Over the summer the staff divided into warring cliques polarized between Bloom and Mungo, who controlled the board of directors, and Cavalletto, who held the lease on the office and was paying the rent. The Bloom/Mungo group was repeatedly outvoted in staff votes by the locals, who outnumbered them; only Steve Diamond of the New York group sided with the outsiders.
Montague farm fight
In August 1968, a successful fundraising event led to an ugly fight over control of the organization's funds, with an angry posse of LNSers trailing Bloom, Mungo, and Diamond to
where they had used the $6,000 cash from the fundraiser to make the down payment on a farm in
Montague which was to be the new headquarters of LNS.
A tense six-hour standoff at the farm ended with Bloom writing a check to Cavalletto, but after the New York group left, Bloom filed kidnapping charges against 13 people, including Cavalletto, Ryan, Dreyer, and Victoria Smith.
The charges were later dismissed.
For the next six months LNS subscribers received rival news packets from LNS-Montague and LNS-New York, but the Montague group was understaffed, underfunded, and isolated on a remote (and cold) country farm. Only the New York headquarters group survived the split, with Young becoming a recognized leader.
Bloom committed suicide the following year. A pro-Montague account of the split appears in Mungo's book ''Famous Long Ago: My Life and Hard Times with the Liberation News Service''.
Reformation as a collective
Now under the control of a collective, for several years LNS was produced from Morningside Heights
Morningside Heights is a neighborhood on the West Side of Upper Manhattan in New York City. It is bounded by Morningside Drive to the east, 125th Street to the north, 110th Street to the south, and Riverside Drive to the west. Morningside ...
in Manhattan, initially from the Claremont Avenue storefront, and later from the basement of an apartment building which at one time had been a food store.
The subscriber base grew to over 500 papers, and a high school
A secondary school describes an institution that provides secondary education and also usually includes the building where this takes place. Some secondary schools provide both '' lower secondary education'' (ages 11 to 14) and ''upper seconda ...
underground press service, run by local high school students, was added. Allen Young estimates that something like 200 staffers worked at LNS over the years, "usually with 8-20 full-time participants or staff at any one time."
By 1972, LNS was garnering support from well-known journalists and activists, as documented in a letter signed by I.F. Stone
Isidor Feinstein "I. F." Stone (December 24, 1907 – June 18, 1989) was an American investigative journalist, writer, and author.
Known for his politically progressive views, Stone is best remembered for ''I. F. Stone's Weekly'' (1953–1971), ...
, Jack Newfield
Jack Abraham Newfield (February 18, 1938 – December 21, 2004) was an American journalist, columnist, author, documentary filmmaker and activist. Newfield wrote for the ''Village Voice'', ''New York Daily News'', ''New York Post'', ''New Y ...
, Nat Hentoff
Nathan Irving Hentoff (June 10, 1925 – January 7, 2017) was an American historian, novelist, jazz and country music critic, and syndicated columnist for United Media. Hentoff was a columnist for ''The Village Voice'' from 1958 to 2009. Fol ...
, and William M. Kunstler published in the ''New York Review of Books
New is an adjective referring to something recently made, discovered, or created.
New or NEW may refer to:
Music
* New, singer of K-pop group The Boyz
Albums and EPs
* ''New'' (album), by Paul McCartney, 2013
* ''New'' (EP), by Regurgitator, ...
''. In an appeal for funds, the signers praised the investigative work of LNS, noting that it had "grown from a mimeoed sheet distributed to ten newspapers to a printed 20-page packet of articles and graphics mailed to nearly 800 subscribers twice a week."
In 1969 LNS published a long essay co-authored by Thorne Dreyer and Victoria Smith, titled "The Movement and the New Media," which was considered to be the first serious journalistic portrait of the increasingly powerful underground press phenomenon. Dreyer also wrote extensively about the growing repression of underground papers throughout the country.
Dissolution
Throughout the 1970s, with the end of the Vietnam War
The Vietnam War (also known by #Names, other names) was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vie ...
and the decline of the New Left, LNS dwindled along with the rapidly disappearing underground press. Reduced to serving only 150 newspapers, the LNS collective decided to close operations in August 1981.[Sirak, Ron. Associated Press: "Alternative News Service Shuts Down," '']Lexington Herald-Leader
The ''Lexington Herald-Leader'' is a newspaper owned by the McClatchy Company and based in Lexington, Kentucky. According to the ''1999 Editor & Publisher International Yearbook'', the paid circulation of the ''Herald-Leader'' is the second large ...
'' (September 13, 1981), p. C10.
Archives
LNS records are archived variously in the Contemporary Culture Collection of Temple University
Temple University (Temple or TU) is a public state-related research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1884 by the Baptist minister Russell Conwell and his congregation Grace Baptist Church of Philadelphia then called Ba ...
Libraries, the Archive of Social Change of the University of Massachusetts Amherst
The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, it ...
Library, Interference Archive
Interference Archive is a volunteer-run library, gallery, and archive of historical materials related to social and political activism and movements. It is located in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City, at 314 7th St, Brookly ...
, and the Archives & Special Collections at Amherst College
Amherst College ( ) is a private liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts. Founded in 1821 as an attempt to relocate Williams College by its then-president Zephaniah Swift Moore, Amherst is the third oldest institution of higher educatio ...
; its photographs are archived at New York University
New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin.
In 1832, the ...
's Tamiment Library
The Tamiment Library is a research library at New York University that documents radical and left history, with strengths in the histories of communism, socialism, anarchism, the New Left, the Civil Rights Movement, and utopian experiments. The R ...
.
See also
*Alternative news agency
An alternative news agency (or alternative news service) operates in a similar fashion to a commercial news agency, but defines itself as an alternative to commercial or "mainstream" operations. They span the political spectrum, but most frequently ...
* List of underground newspapers of the 1960s counterculture
This is a partial list of the local underground newspapers launched during the Sixties era of the hippie/psychedelic/youth/counterculture/New Left/antiwar movements, approximately 1965–1972. This list includes periodically appearing papers of ge ...
Notes
Further reading
*
*Armstrong, David. ''A Trumpet to Arms: Alternative Media in America'' (Boston: South End Press
South End Press was a non-profit book publisher run on a model of participatory economics. It was founded in 1977 by Michael Albert, Lydia Sargent, Juliet Schor, among others, in Boston's South End. It published books written by political activi ...
, 1981), pp. 105–107.
*Wachsberger, Ken, ed. ''Voices from the Underground: Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press'' (Incredible Librarian Books, 1993) {{ISBN, 1-879461-01-3
Azenphony Press
External links
Liberation News Service archive
LNS packet #197 (Sept. 25, 1969)
at the Liberation News Service archive
*LNS records, 1969–1981, at th
Contemporary Culture Collection
of Temple University Libraries.
Liberation News Service (Famous Long Ago Archives)
at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Library Archive of Social Change
in the Archives & Special Collections at Amherst College
in the Archives & Special Collections at Amherst College
Alternative weekly newspapers published in the United States
News agencies based in the United States
Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War
Counterculture of the 1960s