Liberation News Service

Liberation News Service (LNS) was a New Left, anti-war underground press news service which distributed news bulletins and photographs to hundreds of subscribing underground, alternative and radical newspapers from 1967 to 1981.

Liberation News Service was founded in the summer of 1967 by Ray Mungo and Marshall Bloom after they were separated from the United States Student Press Association and its College Press Service. Operating out of a townhouse at 3 Thomas Circle which they shared with the Washington Free Press, with support from private donors and assistance from the nearby Institute for Policy Studies, they were soon joined by other young journalists, including Allen Young, Marty Jezer and photographer David Fenton, sending out packets of articles and photographs on a twice-weekly schedule to underground newspapers across the US and abroad. By February 1968 there were 150 underground papers and 90 college papers subscribing, with most subscribers paying (or at least being billed) $180 a year.

The night before the October 21, 1967 March on the Pentagon, Bloom, Mungo and the other staffers convened a chaotic meeting in a Washington loft with underground press editors from around the country who were in town to cover the march; but they failed to reach an agreement to create a democratic structure in which LNS would be owned and run by its member papers. Operating on their own with a volunteer staff of 12, Bloom and Mungo moved forward with ambitious plans for the expansion of LNS. In December they opened an international Telex line to Oxford, England; and later that winter LNS merged with the Student Communications Network (SCN), based in Berkeley, which had its own nationwide Telex network with terminals in Berkeley, Los Angeles, New York, Ann Arbor, Ames, Iowa, Chicago and Philadelphia, leased from Western Union. In February 1968 LNS took over the SCN office in New York, which had just been opened by former Columbia graduate student George Cavalletto and others in a converted Chinese restaurant on Claremont Avenue in Harlem. Walking by, Steve Diamond saw a brand new Telex machine sitting in an otherwise empty storefront and a sign seeking volunteers, and attended a meeting shortly afterward at which the New York staff was formed. Two months after it opened the New York office became a central focus for LNS activity during the Columbia University student uprising in April 1968, as a continual stream of bulletins going out over the Telex kept underground papers and radio stations across country up to the minute on the latest developments in the Columbia strike. To young radicals across the country it seemed as if the revolution had come.

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