Liberation News Service (LNS) was a New Left, Underground press news service which published news bulletins from 1967 to 1981.
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The Liberation News Service was co-founded in the summer of 1967 by Ray Mungo and Marshall Bloom after the two of them were separated from the United States Student Press Association.[1]
A split in the news collective, then based in New York City (recently relocated from Washington, D.C.), saw Bloom set up a short-lived competing operation in Montague, Massachusetts.
LNS garnered support from well-known journalists and activists, as documented in a letter signed by I.F. Stone, Jack Newfield, Nat Hentoff, and William M. Kunstler published in the New York Review of Books. In an appeal for funds, the signers praised the investigative work of LNS, and noted it had "grown from a mimeoed sheet distributed to ten newspapers to a printed 20-page packet of articles and graphics mailed to nearly 800 subscribers twice a week[2]
Starting in 1968, for several years, LNS was produced from Morningside Heights in Manhattan, initially from a store front, and later from the basement of an apartment building which at one time had been a food store (but sat empty for twenty years).[3] This location provided LNS with a front row seat for the 1968 uprising at Columbia University, for which it provided extensive coverage, including inside the various occupied buildings, at a time when the mainstream media were only printing official statements (or in the case of the New York Post, editorials demanding blood). Coverage of the "big bust" at Columbia, in which over 700 were arrested, was one of the two most widely reprinted of all LNS stories, the other being a piece entitled "Americans Are Unfit for Human Consumption".
Reduced to serving only 150 newspapers, the LNS collective decided to close operations in August 1981.[4] LNS records are archived variously in the Contemporary Culture Collection of Temple University Libraries, the Archive of Social Change of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Library; its photographs are archived at New York University's Tamiment Library.