Liberation News Service
Overview
Liberation News Service, or LNS, was an alternative news agency founded in Washington, District of Columbia, in 1967 to serve the underground, college and movement press of the United States. Twice a week it mailed inexpensive mimeographed packets of articles, opinion, photographs and artwork to hundreds of subscribing newspapers, offering a radical perspective on the Vietnam War, liberation struggles abroad, American politics and the cultural revolution. At its height its subscribers numbered in the hundreds — by some contemporary appeals, nearly 800 — and the combined circulation of the papers it fed was estimated in the millions. It was often described as an Associated Press for the underground. The New York service that survived a famous split in 1968 continued publishing until August 1981.
Founding in Washington
LNS grew out of a rupture in the student press. In the summer of 1967, Marshall Bloom and Raymond Mungo, former editors of the student newspapers at Amherst College and Boston University respectively, were forced out of the United States Student Press Association amid disputes over their radical views; Bloom had denounced the association's parent, the National Student Association, for accepting funds from the CIA. With colleagues including Verandah Porche, they founded an organisation first called the Resistance Press Service, soon renamed Liberation News Service, as a radical alternative to the Associated Press and the Collegiate Press Service.
Operating from a townhouse at 3 Thomas Circle in Washington, shared with the Washington Free Press, and assisted by private donors and the nearby Institute for Policy Studies, the young staff — soon joined by journalists including Allen Young and Marty Jezer and photographer David Fenton — sent out its inaugural mimeographed packet and settled into a twice-weekly rhythm. Its first great test came quickly: coverage of the October 1967 march on the Pentagon gave the infant service credibility with movement papers hungry for reporting the mainstream wires did not supply.
The News Packets
The LNS packet was the product. Twice weekly, editors assembled hard news, opinion pieces, poetry, photographs and artwork into a printed packet — eventually running to about twenty pages — and mailed it to subscribers across the United States and abroad. Because underground and college papers were chronically short of staff and money, LNS copy often filled their national and international pages wholesale, and its photographs and graphics were reprinted just as freely.
Coverage concentrated on what the established media overlooked or, in the founders' view, distorted: the war in Vietnam and resistance to it, national liberation movements, American radical politics, and the emerging counterculture. Later, the New York service ranged widely over South Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, and domestically over prison reform, labour movements, and struggles for racial, gender and sexual equality.
Move to New York and the 1968 Split
Less than a year after its founding, LNS tired of Washington's high rents and of conditions in the capital after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and in June 1968 it moved its headquarters to New York City. Two months later the organisation split, in a schism that mirrored the wider argument within the American left between politics and culture.
The more traditional Marxist activists remained in New York. Bloom, Mungo and their allies — the so-called Virtuous Caucus, as against the New Yorkers they dubbed vulgar Marxists — withdrew to farms in western Massachusetts and southern Vermont: Bloom to Montague, Massachusetts, and Mungo to Packer Corners near Brattleboro, Vermont. For about a year the two factions issued competing LNS packets, until the Montague operation, hampered by winter conditions and a small staff, ended production in January 1969. Bloom died by suicide on 1 November 1969. Mungo told the story of the founding and the split in his 1970 book Famous Long Ago, and the Montague farm itself began a long second life as a commune.
LNS-New York in the 1970s
The New York service carried on through the 1970s as a hub of international activists, journalists and photographers, producing dense, photograph-rich packets on the political left's agenda long after the movement's peak. Its records, preserved from a subscribing paper, the Indianapolis Free Press, include a substantial run of packets 102 to 701 spanning 1968 to 1975 — evidence of both the service's longevity and its reach into the heartland's underground press.
That longevity came at a price. LNS operated on a shoestring, dependent on sympathetic funders, and its collective structure made decisions slow and sometimes fractious. Projects beyond the packet were attempted — including an ill-fated venture connected with a San Francisco publication, Dock of the Bay, abandoned after a clash with feminists — reflecting the internal debates of the era's left as much as any business plan.
Funding Crisis
Much of LNS's funding came from liberal Protestant church organisations, channelled through bodies such as the University Christian Movement. That support became a vulnerability in 1970, when the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security subpoenaed the service's financial records and details of its church funding were leaked to a conservative columnist. A right-wing newsletter amplified the story, alarming some churchgoers who feared their donations were funding radical propaganda. By 1971 the churches had cut off funding entirely.
Prominent journalists and activists — I. F. Stone, Jack Newfield, Nat Hentoff and William M. Kunstler — signed a public appeal for LNS published in the New York Review of Books, praising its investigative work and noting how far it had come from a mimeographed sheet sent to ten newspapers. The appeal kept the service alive, but it never regained a secure financial footing.
Decline and Dissolution
By the mid-1970s the conditions that had created LNS were disappearing. The Vietnam War ended, the New Left fragmented, and the underground press itself dwindled as papers folded or professionalised. In 1976 LNS moved to a loft on West 17th Street in Manhattan. Reduced to serving about 150 newspapers, the collective voted to close, and operations ended in August 1981 — fourteen years after the founding in Washington.
A decade later the name was briefly revived: in 1990 a group of younger radical journalists led by Jason Pramas, with Raymond Mungo's blessing, restarted the service as New Liberation News Service from Cambridge, Massachusetts, publishing from 1990 to 1993.
Key Figures
Founders Marshall Bloom and Raymond Mungo defined the service's first phase: Bloom the organiser whose confrontation with the student press establishment sparked the founding, Mungo its chronicler. Around them gathered a generation of movement journalists — Allen Young, Marty Jezer, photographer David Fenton and many others — for whom LNS was a training ground in alternative media. The New York collective that sustained the service through the 1970s was less personality-driven, but its work was defended publicly by some of the most respected independent journalists in America, from I. F. Stone onward.
Legacy and Archives
LNS mattered because it solved a distribution problem. Hundreds of small papers, each produced by a handful of volunteers, could not report on Vietnam, on liberation movements or on national politics by themselves; a shared packet made them, collectively, a national press with a readership in the millions. Historians of the underground press treat LNS, alongside the Underground Press Syndicate, as the connective tissue of that media ecosystem.
Its records survive at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, whose Special Collections hold both the original service's papers — packets 1 to 120, administrative records, photographs and printing artefacts in eleven boxes — and the New York service's records from 1968 to 1981. Together they preserve, in unusual completeness, the day-to-day output of the alternative wire that told the American movement its own news.
