Liberation News Service (New York, N.Y.)

Background on Liberation News Service (New York, N.Y.)

Founded in 1967 when Marshall Bloom and Raymond Mungo were fired from the United States Student Press Association (USSPA) for their radical views, Liberation News Service grew into an impressive alternative news agency during a period of political and social upheaval in the United States and abroad. LNS provided images and text via inexpensive mimeographed news packets mailed out to subscribers, with radical coverage of the war in Vietnam, national liberation struggles abroad, American politics, and the cultural revolution. At its height, LNS had hundreds of subscribers, spanning the gamut of college newspapers and the underground and alternative press. Its readership was estimated to be in the millions.

Located in Washington, D.C., LNS gained initial success and momentum with its coverage of the October 1967 protests at the Pentagon. But, in less than a year the group had tired of both its high rent and the conditions in the nation’s capital in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and so officially moved its headquarters to New York City in June 1968.

Two months after moving to NYC, LNS split into two factions, with the sides mirroring common points of dispute from within the leftist movement. The more traditional political and Marxist activists remained in New York, while those more aligned with the countercultural and “hippie” movement settled on farms in western Massachusetts and southern Vermont. The story of LNS, up to and including the split, is told from Mungo’s perspective in his 1970 classic book Famous Long Ago. For a year, each faction put out competing versions of LNS news packets, until the winter conditions and small staff at the farm in Montague caused their production to end in January 1969.

LNS-New York, however, continued throughout the 1970s to produce impressive news packets from the political left on topics often ignored by the mainstream press. Shaping global stories from Vietnam, to South Africa, to Latin America, to the Middle East, and national stories on politics, prison reform, labor movements, and racial, gender, and sexual equality, LNS-NY was a hub of international activists, journalists, and photographers. With the end of the Vietnam War, and the general decline of the New Left, in addition to growing financial instability, LNS-New York ceased its operations in 1981.