Article: Berkeley Journalism featured in Smoking Typewriters
opednews.com
Seeing a copy of Smoking Typewriters (by John McMillan Oxford University
Press Copyright 2011) for sale over the weekend, inspired us to see if
the Berkeley Public Library had that book available in its new releases
section because we were curious about how far one would have to delve
into it before encountering any reference to the Berkeley Barb. When we
learned that the Library would be glad to take a suggestion that they
acquire that particular work, we sped back to Moe's Book Store on
Telegraph Ave. and overcame the cheapskate aspect of our personality and
bought a copy of the new book with the subtitle: "The Sixties
Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America."
The Introduction compared and contrasted the coverage of the Rolling
Stones free concert at Altamont which had appeared in the San Francisco
Chronicle and the Berkeley Barb. The Barb was mentioned in the first
sentence.
Since the Chronicle was the flagship of William R. Hearst's newspaper
empire and the Barb was one of the first "underground" newspapers, the
corporate viewpoint was very different from the work in the publication
driven by the drive towards profits than was the reportage found in the
alternative news source.
The basic business philosophy of those two publications was as different
as that of Fox News and this website. It's as if it is just a matter of
history to see that the official government endorsed view of reality is
engineered to perpetually spawn a market for media which was designed to
subvert the distortion of reality by the unscrupulous businessmen hoping
to curry favor from the politicians.
The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and their Port Huron
Statement is credited with being the source of inspiration for the
underground press movement. The Village Voice and Paul Krasner's
magazine, The Realist are acknowledged to be the prototypes from the
Fifties for the underground newspaper movement of the Sixties. Passing
mention is made of the role underground newspapers played during the
German occupation of Paris (France, not Texas).
McMillan takes a close look at the stories about the start of the Los
Angeles Free Press, and the Paper in the East Lancing Michigan area near
Michigan State University (MSU), and the Rag in Austin Texas. The author
itemizes numerous parallels and ties between the Paper and events in
Berkeley CA.
In chapter three, McMillan looks at Berkeley's association with a
widespread belief in the late Sixties that smoking dried banana skins
was just as important to enthusiasts of psychedelic experimentation as
was the dreaded marijuana plant that spawned a nation wide panic over
the concern that the youth of America were risking falling into the life
of a drug fiend just for a few momentary feelings of elation called
"highs" or "kicks."
McMillan, in a book that is heavily annotated with scholarly references
to provide a lifetime of work for at-home fact checkers, cavalierly
quotes numerous efforts by the underground press to substantiate and
validate the urban legend that the peels of the tropical fruit could, if
dried and smokes like tobacco, produce a transitory feeling of bliss
known as "Mellow Yellow." In every case, the road test was declared to
substantiate the claim, but then McMillan notes that the FDA declared
the belief to be a "hoax." He undercuts the work of the government
agency by injecting an unverifiable line from a contemporary stage play
that asks: "Now do you think a responsible government agency would
mislead the American public?" McMillan doesn't include the words "nudge
nudge wink wink," but he ignores the strong possibility that he may be
responsible for possibly causing a number of young and gullible readers
to jump to the conclusion that the "hoax" explanation was itself the
real hoax and thus subsequently lures them into a "don't try this at
home" bit of fact checking.
Chapter four, which details the rise of the Liberation News Service
(LNS) indirectly focus on Berkeley because the organization, which came
to sudden prominence in the journalism industry because of its coverage
of both the "Battle of the Pentagon," which started on October 21, 1967
and the week long student strike at Columbia which erupted spontaneously
on April 23, 1968, had one of its first three teletype machines in
Berkeley, when the organization started using them in February of 1968
(page 103).
Since the students didn't permit reporters from Establishment media into
the building, journalism student Steve Diamond was one of the LNS
personnel who acted as a human news wire network between the various
occupied buildings and got a unique perspective on the evolving events.
Diamond is quoted (page 114) as saying in September of 1968: "We've
educated a generation that no longer buys or needs daily newspapers."
Isn't that sentiment being echoed these days on the Internets?
The lively and entertaining events that occurred when the staff of the
Berkeley Barb revolted and formed the nucleus of a rival publication
that came to be called The Berkeley Tribe were glossed over quickly on
page 122 and again in Chapter 6's footnote no. 84 on page 239.
[Personal note: This reviewer, while covering a 2010 story, in Berkeley
CA, of the cripple peoples' rights protest known as "Arnieville," heard
a recounting of that bit of underground newspaper history and is of the
opinion that that facet of the topic at least deserved a longer and more
conspicuous place in the book's main body of text. We learned later in
the book that the squabbling at a fictional underground newspaper, the
Back Bay Mainline, was the basis for the 1977 film Between the Lines,
which was set in the Boston area.]
McMillan quotes Bob Woodward's 1974 assessment of the situation: "The
underground press was largely right about government sabotage but the
country didn't get upset because it was the left that was sabotaged."
The chapter about the power struggles in the editorial offices across
the USA ends with the transcription of Thomas Forcade's statement
presented to a Congressional hearing on May 13, 1970. The words would be
a hilarious blast from the past if the subtle implications of the move
to impose "net neutrality" were only a figment of the imaginations of
the conspiracy theory lunatics.
For the underground press, the question of "who decides" was a matter of
basic philosophy. Their debate established once and for all that no
topic was off limits in a free press. Internet sites would later make
the one essential exception for conspiracy theories, but essentially
continued the "no holds barred" philosophy established in the Sixties.
The Liberation News Service, as the summer of 1968 drew to a close,
split into two rival factions. One wanted to move the headquarters to a
farm in Vermont and the other thought that staying in the country's
media hub in New York City made sense. The events that followed sound
like the scenario for a Three Stooges episode. The press was hijacked
and a late night confrontation at the farm had ominous potential
endings.
1 | 2
BP graduated from college in the mid sixties (at the bottom of the
class?) He told his draft board that Vietnam could be won without his
participation. He is still appologizing for that mistake. He received
his fist photo lesson from a future (
more...
)
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http://www.opednews.com/articles/Berkeley-Journalism-featur-by-Bob-Patterson-
110203-795.html
Via InstaFetch
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