BUZZFLASH PUBLISHER:Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Rise of the Underground Press
Thursday, 07 May 2015 09:33
Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Rise of the Underground Press
2015.7.5 BF Berkowitz(Photo: Ahmad Hammoud)BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
This year is the 50th anniversary of the rise of the Underground Press. The growth of alternative media across the country in the mid-to-late 1960s was a sudden and unexpected phenomenon. Newspapers appeared in all sorts of places, some, where they might be expected, including Berkeley, California’s The Berkeley Barb (1965), New York City’s The East Village Other (1965), and Chicago, Illinois’ The Chicago Seed (1967). Many other papers popped up in smaller cities and towns, some of which were attached to a college or university, such as Ann Arbor, Michigan’s The Ann Arbor Argus (1969), Madison, Wisconsin’s The Madison Kaleidoscope (1967), and Lawrence, Kansas’ Reconstruction (1969).
The need was manifest to political and social activists: Either the mainstream media ignored important issues of the times -- the growing Vietnam War protest movement, the civil rights movement, New Left politics, issues affecting students on college campuses, the counterculture’s music, drug use and alternative lifestyles -- or their coverage of them was inadequate and often incompetent.
Young people wanted to report the news as they experienced and understood it, and tell their own stories, and that is what they did.
Independent news services, such as Liberation News Service and the Underground Press Syndicate, were created to serve the mushrooming crop of newspapers. At the same time, political organizations, and a number of organizations involved with what was called “the party building movement,” founded their own publications.
As Geoffrey Rips wrote in his 1981 book, The Campaign Against The Underground Press: “In the 1960s, investigative journalists, poets, novelists, political activists, community organizers, and artists formed an unprecedented alliance for change in the vigorous underground press movement that flourished in the United States. This network of counterculture, campus, and other alternative media brought larger political issues into communities, awakening citizens to their own power to influence national policy.”
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http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/celebrating-the-50th-anniversary-of-the-rise-of-the-underground-press
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