NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Liberation News Service

The Liberation News Service (LNS) was a leftist alternative news service which published news bulletins from 1967 to 1981. 1967 (MCMLXVII) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar (the link is to a full 1967 calendar). ... 1981 (MCMLXXXI) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

It was co-founded in 1967 by Ray Mungo, Marshall Bloom, and Verandah Porche when Mungo and Bloom left College Press Service (CPS) in a dispute. The founding meeting was quite tumultuous, and it was chronicled in a book by Mungo, Famous Long Ago: Ray Mungo (Raymond Mungo) is the author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books. ... Marshall Bloom was a cofounder of Liberation News Service (LNS) with Ray Mungo and Verandah Porche. ... Verandah Porche is a well-regarded poet living in Vermont. ... College Press Service (CPS) is a commercial news agency supplying stories to campus newspapers. ...

"Marshall began to speak of the goals of LNS when the staff of the East Village Other, led by Walter Bowart in Indian headdress, began a lengthy poem about the underground and an enthusiastic pitch for the Underground Press Service, which EVO directed. This brought others to their feet with charges of embezzlement against UPS and EVO. John Wilcock, in his clipped British accent, quickly corroborated that EVO was staffed by a pack of thieves...Before the issue could be resolved, however, Allen Cohen of the San Francisco Oracle rose to read a poem, precipitating a lengthy East-West poetry competition between the New York Indian forces of EVO and the San Francisco Oracle Hari-Krishna heads.

"And so it went in that terrible loft. The college editors were interested mostly in campus revolution, the pacifists in the war, the freaks in cultural revolution and cultural purity. The underlying buzz became a steady roar; Marshall burned his draft card and quit the podium. A few fist fights broke out between warring factions of the anti-war forces...It was clear on first meeting our constituency, that LNS was to be an uneasy coalition."

The impetus for the founding of LNS came from Mungo's participation in an international meeting: The East Village Other (often abbreviated as EVO), was a leading underground newspaper in New York City during the late 1960s. ... The Underground Press Syndicate, commonly known as UPS, and later known as the Alternative Press Syndicate or APS, was a network of countercultural newspapers and magazines formed in 1967 by the publishers of several early underground papers, including the East Village Other, the Los Angeles Free Press, the San Francisco... John Wilcock (b. ... Allen Cohens work includes music for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo instruments, and voice. ... The Oracle of the City of San Francisco, also known as the San Francisco Oracle, was an underground newspaper published in the late 1960s. ...

"In 1967, Raymond Mungo attended a meeting in Czechoslovakia among radical journalists and representatives of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. Resulting from talks on how to increase pressure at home to end United States involvement in the Vietnam War..."

"LNS sent twice-weekly news packets of articles and photographs to member underground publications. With its worldwide contacts among Western radical groups and Third World liberation forces, LNS gave the underground press a global perspective it had formerly lacked."[1]

A split in the news collective, based in New York City, saw Mungo, Bloom, and Porche set up a short-lived competing operation in western Massachusetts. Mungo described the split as between the "Vulgar Marxists" in New York and the "Virtuous Caucus" who "liberated" the printing press and moved it to 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] Isador Feinstein Stone (better known as I.F. Stone) (December 24, 1907 – July 17, 1989) was an iconoclastic American investigative journalist best known for his influential political newsletter, . Stone was born in Philadelphia. ... Nat Hentoff (born June 10, 1925) is an American civil libertarian, free speech absolutist, pro-life advocate, anti-death penalty advocate, jazz critic, historian, biographer and anecdotist, and columnist for the Village Voice, Legal Times, Washington Times, The Progressive, Editor & Publisher, Free Inquiry and Jewish World Review. ... William Moses Kunstler (July 7, 1919 - September 4, 1995) was a U.S. lawyer and civil rights activist. ...

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 had sat empty for twenty years. This gave it 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 NY 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". In early March 1967, a Columbia University SDS activist named Bob Feldman reportedly discovered documents in the International Law Library detailing Columbias institutional affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a think-tank affiliated with the US Department of Defense. ...

LNS was restarted as New Liberation News Service with Ray Mungo's blessing by a group of younger radical journalists led by Jason Pramas in 1990. They continued to publish NLNS from their offices in Cambridge, MA until 1993.

Also in the 1990s, a Santa Cruz based group established Liberation News which did radio programs, published a newspaper, and established a newswire on the internet. Rosa Luxemburg Liberation News (Internationalist) or usually just called Liberation News was first established in 1996 as a radio program on Free Radio Santa Cruz. ...

Since then various individuals have used the name Liberation News for a variety of projects.

$I n s e r t f o r m u l a h e r e$ ==See also==

News agency (alternative)

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. ...

External links

Collection at Tamiment Library
Liberation News (Internationalist)
Liberation News Service
COA News - Portal to Independent News

External links GA_googleFillSlot("encyclopedia_square");

Further reading

External links