The media is in a period of dramatic change, with new technologies dramatically changing how people communicate, consume information, and connect with each other. But some things don’t change—today, as in the 1960s, a collection of Big Media entities seek to dominate the media landscape, acting as gatekeepers and deciding in newsrooms and offices around the country what the masses should and should not watch, listen to, and read.

We don’t have to go far back in time to see the dangers of an arrogant, unaccountable, and irresponsible mass media. The United States recently went to war against Iraq...

It is a privilege to be asked to write a foreword toVoices from the Underground,a collection of alternative journalistic pieces of that portion of the 1960s and 1970s loosely referred to as the Vietnam era. This work could not have come at a more opportune time when, as starkly illustrated by the reportage of the Gulf War, the establishment media have supinely surrendered their appropriate functions in favor of accepting official briefings and handouts as legitimate sources of news. It is my hope that these fascinating and uniformly well-written pieces enjoy a wide currency, particularly among those who...

Another decade, another war. And another round of media coverage, warts and all.

As I write in early February 1991, reporting on the Persian Gulf war has been as whiz-bang as the technology waging it. Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy about the global village has been validated in CNN real time. Hundreds of reporters have done their best to get the story, despite varying degrees of censorship invoked by every key nation involved in conflict. Skepticism of Pollyanna-ish Pentagon claims has come earlier than it did in Vietnam; less than three weeks into the war, page 1 of theNew York Times...

H. Rap Brown was in jail in Louisiana on trumped-up charges. The Black Panther Party was striding around northern California declaring it the right and duty of our ethnic group—the African American people—to defend itself with arms against brutal police. And there sat I, in what I thought would be a good position to cover the freedom movement, as an editor/writer forEbonymagazine in Chicago.

The problem was, in 1968 both Rap Brown and the Panthers were strictly verboten as sympathetic topics for our country’s biggest magazine aimed at African American readers.Ebony’s publisher, John H. Johnson,...

It began as a dream and ended as a legend. One morning in the late spring of 1966 I dreamed that I was flying around the world. When I looked down, I saw people reading a newspaper with rainbows printed on it—in Paris at the Eiffel Tower, in Moscow at Red Square, on Broadway in New York, at the Great Wall of China, everywhere—a rainbow newspaper.

I told my friend and lover, Laurie, about the dream, and she went out early for a walk up the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park to Haight Street telling everyone along the...

I took a trip to Connecticut one summer day in 1989 and read dog-eared issues of my old friend, that notorious radical rag from Atlanta, Georgia, theGreat Speckled Bird,issues dated from 1969 to 1971. I sat in the special collections room of the giant library at University of Connecticut (UConn), lost in memories of my years working with theBird.The young woman librarian with a shirt that said “Contra, no!” glared at me when I laughed out loud. She looked away when I cried.

During that warm, lazy afternoon, I visited a world all too familiar in...

To understand howAkwesasne Notes,the most influential aboriginal newspaper of the twentieth century, came to be, one must understand the history of the Mohawk community of Akwesasne, where it was born in 1968. History among the Mohawks is a highly personal matter since it involves the life stories of a people with, like all Native peoples, a deep spiritual connection with the land in which the story takes root.

When a Mohawk person speaks of his community, it becomes a narrative in which he carries the experiences of his ancestors across the generations. Akwesasne is a community rich in...

Liberation News Service! Founded in youthful genius, LNS moved this country as few other rag-tag operations ever did. It was the AP and UPI of the madcap underground, supplying the counterculture with a wide variety of articles and essays, proofs and spoofs that were read and loved by emerging millions. When it fissioned, after less than a year of pure, blinding light, its fallout comprised yet another news service (that lasted another decade) and a magnificent communal farm with a compelling activist destiny of its own.

What we didn’t know about that explosion at the time, however, was the malevolent...

Off our backswas founded in late 1969 with $400 that had been collected to start an antiwar coffeehouse for GIs. The women who started it felt that, since the Left press was not covering the new women’s liberation movement adequately, a women’s newspaper was essential. Marlene Wicks was one of the co-founders.

Ten years later, in an interview that appeared inoob’s tenth anniversary issue, she remembered the circumstances surrounding that decision

The paper really started because Marilyn Salzman-Webb was writing for theGuardianin New York, and every time she would send articles having to do with women,...

Off our backs(oob), the first national feminist newspaper to emerge on the east coast during the Vietnam War era, is a quintessential child of the sixties—born of enthusiasm, a pinch of planning, and a lot of idealistic vision. And now, forty years after it began, it is still being published.

Although no one recognized it at the time, the paper’s beginnings can be traced to the summer of 1968. Elsewhere, hippies were giving up the Haight, police were rioting in Chicago, and the Weather Underground was beginning to form. But in Washington, D.C., it was hot. Sticky hot....

This article is dedicated to my hometown of Lansing, Michigan. I was born in Detroit and I was raised in Cleveland. At present, I live in Ann Arbor. But when I visit Lansing, I still feel at home because I became politically and philosophically aware there in 1970 after the murders at Kent State and Jackson State, the student strikes that followed, and my first political arrest. I thank then–Michigan State University president Clifton Wharton, a black member of the white power structure in this country, who ordered that student participants in a discussion on racism at the Michigan...

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, young Americans, disproportionately poor and of color, were shipped off to Southeast Asia—ostensibly to fight for freedom for the Vietnamese people. They soon learned that there was precious little respect for their own freedom inside the U.S. military. Enlisted people were angry about racism, brutal conditions, lack of freedom, and the insane policies they were supposed to defend with their lives. They began to oppose the war.

Initially, these enlisted people were isolated both from the mainstream military community whose values they were beginning to question, and from people outside the military...

There are certain similarities between America’s unjust wars in Vietnam and in Iraq, and in the antiwar movements that have arisen in each era to oppose Washington’s imperial propensities, but the political differences between the United States today and the leftist current that swept the country in the 1960s to mid-1970s are profound.

At this writing in April 2008, the United States is in the clutches of conservatism. The Democratic Party now occupies the center of the political spectrum, and often tilts to the center-right. The party’s center-left wing has atrophied. The Republican Party seems to extend from the right...

How does an Eagle Scout and church youth-group leader end up hawking underground newspapers with nudes and natural food recipes? In the 1960s the transition seemed, well, organic. In the fall of 1967, I was a senior in high school. I still clearly recall the night I decided that the underground press was the most exciting occupation in the world—and for many of us back then, it really was. There was an exhilarating sense of immediacy and danger that seems almost naive today, and hard to comprehend for people who did not share the experience.

In 1967 the debate...

Space City!, one of several hundred counterculture newspapers spawned by the New Left during the late 1960s, was conceived in Nirvana—the Nirvana coffeehouse in midtown Manhattan, that is—located in the basement area of an apartment building in the West Seventies just off Broadway. A holdover from the Beat era, the Nirvana served espresso, cappuccino, and other exotic coffees. For some reason, Thorne Dreyer, a Texas radical, my coworker at Liberation News Service, and the man I lived with (see figure 1), took a fancy to the place. I wasn’t all that wild about the Nirvana, but it was...