"A superb history... Balanced, informed and readable, the book offers compelling evidence that these alternative media are often 'the unacknowledged cutting edge' of American journalism."
-Publishers Weekly
"This is a wholly admirable book, disciplined in its scholarship, balanced in its approach, edifying it is information, penetrating in its perceptions."
-Daniel Schorr, Senior Correspondent, Cable News Network
"David Armstrong has written a useful, intelligent and comprehensive chronicle of the origins and impact of the alternative media in contemporary American society."
-Los Angeles Times
"Armstrong clearly sympathizes with the idealism and whimsy of the underground journalists whose aim was 'nothing less than changing the world,' yet his sentiments do not get in the way of the steady analysis he applies to the subject."
-The Progressive
"...meticulously sourced and attributed...both accurate and fair."
-Washington Journalism Review
David Armstrong is former editor of the Berkeley Barb and writer/narrator for KPFA radio. He has written about media for the Columbia Journalism Review, the Village Voice and the Washington Journalism Review. His column "American Journal" is syndicated in urban weeklies and college newspapers.
Excerpt
Activists throughout the underground media saw their work as political weapons for stopping the war. Even the less radical rock radio stations took propeace stands, giving airplay to antiwar anthems by the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Phil Ochs. By 1970, alienation from U.S. government policies was so great that San Francisco's KSAN radio, in search of reliable information about the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, called the head of the Provisional Revolutionary Government in Paris and broadcast the conversation in its newscasts. The station's reporters didn't trust their own government to tell the truth. As for the Vietnamese communists, they were regarded not as enemies, but as human beings whom it was possible to communicate with and even trust.
[...]
The underground press augmented its dispatches on the war in Vietnam with reports on the war at home - the repression of peace demonstrators by authorities, maps and guides for major marches, notices of upcoming meetings and rallies. In 1967, folksinger Phil Ochs wrote an article for the Los Angeles Free Press announcing a "The-War-Is-Over" rally directly across the street from a $500-a-plate dinner for Lyndon Johnson in Century City. Ochs planned to charge a one-cent admission to his rally, at which radicals would celebrate the spirit of resistance and look to the day when the war was really over. When Los Angeles police, swinging nightsticks, broke up the demonstration, the event made national news. The following year, Ochs recorded his song "The War Is Over," which became one of his best-known efforts, pointing up the intimate connections among underground media, radical musicians, and the peace movement as a whole.