Liberation News Service

Liberation News Service (LNS) was a New Left, anti-war underground press news agency that distributed news bulletins and photographs to hundreds of subscribing underground, alternative and radical newspapers from 1967 to 1981. Considered the "Associated Press" for the underground press, at its zenith the LNS served more than 500 papers. Founded in Washington, D.C., it operated out of New York City for most of its existence.

Overview

Liberation News Service distributed news to a wide range of audiences, including African Americans, factory workers, women, ethnic minorities, and high school students; and institutions like bookstores, libraries, community centers, and prisons. One of LNS' mandates was documenting contemporary social movements, including worker strikes in Ohio, miners' rights movements, and the Attica Prison riot. LNS went beyond domestic news, covering international events in Africa, the Dominican Republic, and Latin America. It offered extensive reporting on the Vietnam War, including the lives of people in both North and South Vietnam. LNS provides scoops on important stories, covering topics like torture in Vietnam and political corruption in San Diego before other major news outlets. 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."

History

Foundation

thumb|3 Thomas Circle NW, Washington, D.C., in 1954

Liberation News Service was founded in August 1967 Operating out of a townhouse at 3 Thomas Circle which they shared with the Washington Free Press, the LNS soon released its inaugural mimeographed news packet.

With support from private donors and assistance from the nearby Institute for Policy Studies, they were soon joined by other young journalists, including Allen Young, Marty Jezer, and photographer David Fenton, 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 — co-founder of the Austin, Texas, underground paper The Rag — were widely distributed, appearing regularly in dozens of periodicals. Dreyer's coverage of the October 21, 1967, March on the Pentagon – with its massive acts of civil disobedience – 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 line to Oxford, England; and later that winter LNS merged with the Student Communications Network (SCN), based in Berkeley, California, 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.

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 graduate student George Cavalletto and others in a converted Chinese restaurant on Claremont Avenue in Morningside Heights. 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. 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.

The subscriber base grew to over 500 papers, and a high school 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." Founded by young radicals and SDS members associated with the New Left activist paper Movement, staffers included Steve Diamond of the Liberation News Service.

Controversy with other participants in the underground press movement in the Bay Area developed when some of the Dock of the Bay staff were involved in a side project to launch a separate paper to be called the San Francisco Sex Review with the idea that profits from sex ads could be used to subsidize Dock of the Bay and other New Left projects in San Francisco. This project was aborted after a clash with feminists, and Dock of the Bay ceased publication shortly afterward.

Funding crisis

Much of LNS' funding came from liberal Protestant church organizations such as the aforementioned University Christian Movement. In 1970, however, the United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security subpoenaed LNS's financial records and leaked details about their church funding to a right-wing Midwestern columnist. A conservative newsletter then amplified the story, sparking outrage among some churchgoers in New York, who feared their donations were being used to fund "pro-Mao, pro-Castro pornography." By 1971, facing this backlash, the churches cut off all funding to LNS.

As a result of this funding crisis, the well-known journalists and activists I.F. Stone, Jack Newfield, Nat Hentoff, and William M. Kunstler wrote a letter of support for LNS that was published in the New York Review of Books. 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." Reduced to serving only 150 newspapers, the LNS collective decided to close operations in August 1981.

New Liberation News Service

In 1990, "LNS was restarted as New Liberation News Service with Ray Mungo's blessing by a group of younger radical journalists led by Jason Pramas.... They ... publish<nowiki>[</nowiki>ed<nowiki>]</nowiki> NLNS from their offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts," from 1990 to 1993.

Notes

External links

LNS packets at the Internet Archive
Liberation News Service archive
LNS packet #197 (Sept. 25, 1969) at the Liberation News Service archive
LNS photograph collection at Tamiment Library
LNS records, 1969–1981, at the 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
Marshall Bloom (AC 1966) Alternative Press Collection at the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections
Marshall Bloom Papers at the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections
David Kerr Research Materials on Liberation News Service and the Alternative Press at the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections
Under the Ground: The Story of Liberation News Service, feature-length documentary produced by Dorothy Dickie aired on PBS in 2021