Liberation News Service

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Liberation News Service (LNS) was a New Left, Underground press news service which published news bulletins from 1967 to 1981.

Contents

[edit] History

Liberation News Service was co-founded in the summer of 1967 by Ray Mungo and Marshall Bloom after the two of them were separated from the United States Student Press Association.[1]

A split in the news collective, then based in New York City (recently relocated from Washington, D.C.), saw Bloom set up a short-lived competing operation in Montague, Massachusetts.

LNS garnered support from well-known journalists and activists, as documented in a letter signed by I.F. Stone, Jack Newfield, Nat Hentoff, and William M. Kunstler published in the New York Review of Books. In an appeal for funds, the signers praised the investigative work of LNS, and noted 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[2]

Starting in 1968, for several years, LNS was produced from Morningside Heights in Manhattan, initially from a store front, and later from the basement of an apartment building which at one time had been a food store (but sat empty for twenty years).[3] This location provided LNS with a front row seat for the 1968 uprising at Columbia University, for which it provided extensive coverage, including inside the various occupied buildings, at a time when the mainstream media were only printing official statements (or in the case of the New York Post, editorials demanding blood). Coverage of the "big bust" at Columbia, in which over 700 were arrested, was one of the two most widely reprinted of all LNS stories, the other being a piece entitled "Americans Are Unfit for Human Consumption".

LNS' contribution to American journalism included an advocacy position on formerly taboo topics, such as psychedelic drugs and homosexuality, as well as promoting activism on behalf of movements for social change, especially various third world liberation movements and feminism. There was a reporter filing from Vietnam, and correspondents were sent by LNS to Africa and Latin America, as well as to American cities and towns to report on labor union struggles. LNS staff members often liked to think of themselves as propagandists in the "good sense of the term," i.e., propagating ideas that would make the world a better place.

LNS added a touch of professionalism to the so-called underground press and also sponsored several national get-togethers for writers and activists interested in alternative media. The people of the underground press helped forge a national youth culture and in both subtle and direct ways influenced their colleagues in the "establishment media." The LNS print shop offered its facilities at low cost or no cost to other movement groups, in particular the Black Panther Party. The lifestyle of LNS staff members mirrored that of many movement activists, including group meals, communal living, subsistence salaries and considerable interest in mind-expanding drugs, rock and roll, sex and intimate relationships.

In an essay published by LNS on March 1, 1969, Thorne Dreyer and Victoria Smith wrote that the news service "was an attempt at a new kind of journalism -- developing a more personalistic style of reporting, questioning bourgeois conceptions of 'objectivity' and reevaluating established notions about the nature of news..." 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."[4]

Reduced to serving only 150 newspapers, the LNS collective decided to close operations in August 1981.[5] LNS records are archived variously in the Contemporary Culture Collection of Temple University Libraries, the Archive of Social Change of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Library; its photographs are archived at New York University's Tamiment Library.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ McMillian, John (2011). Smoking typewriters : the Sixties underground press and the rise of alternative media in America. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195319927. 
  2. ^ Hentoff, Nat; Kunstler, William M.; Newfield, Jack; Stone, I.F. (September 21, 1972). "To the Editors: LNS". New York Review of Books. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/10081. Retrieved 2009-07-25. 
  3. ^ Leamer, Lawrence (1972). The paper revolutionaries : the rise of the underground press. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0671211447. 
  4. ^ Dreyer, Thorne and Victoria Smith (1969), "The Movement and the New Media," Liberation News Service, published at The Rag archives.
  5. ^ Ron Sirak, "Alternative News Service Shuts Down," Associated Press, Lexington Herald-Leader, September 13, 1981, p. C10.

[edit] Further reading

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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