IMAGINE HAVING TO GO to your local head-shop just to read a blog or two. The blog-equivalent 40-odd years ago was the underground newspaper, the publishing phenomenon of the ’60s, in which writers who are now in their sixties provided what blogs now provide in abundance – an alternative to the mainstream media.
By RICHARD GREENWALD [In These Times] – Communication is the oxygen of social movements, but scholars have rarely focused attention on the organs of social protest. In the 19th century, the labor and radical movements all had their own press, as did various ethnic communities, and each was vital to its cause. The medium has changed (from small magazines, to cheaply printed local community newspapers to Twitter), but the message is the same: Social movements need organic forms of communication because without it, they die.
Smoking Typewriters chronicles the pioneers of what today we call “independent media.” [John] McMillian meticulously mines the rich archive of the alternative press to reveal these newspapers as products of their era, tied to activist communities as well as powerful personalities, and linked through ideology and more than a little hustle and business moxie. During the Sixties (the author refers to the era as the Sixties, and the decade as the ’60s) such newspapers became the lifeblood of the movement, connecting both isolated pockets of resistance and individuals to larger communities and happenings in Berkeley, Madison, Ann Arbor and New York. They told the world what was going on.
These pioneers, angered by the mainstream press, sought to create their own version of the news, a true alternative. McMillian profiles the founders of famed ’60s papers, such as Art Kunkin, a counterculture figure whose LA Free Press (the “Freep”) provided sophisticated coverage of the 1965 Watts Riots. We see the dynamic duo of Ray Mungo and Marshall Bloom, who founded the Liberation News Service, a sort of alternative Associated Press, which published weekly news. We also learn how John Wilcock willed the Underground Press Syndicate into being. We see the egoism, petty fights and arrogance, as well as the real fiscal woes of these organizations.
Continued at In These Times | More Chronicle & Notices.
