I can write the alternative press’s history — or one passably passionate version of it — because the institution’s trajectory matches my own. As a hard-core baby boomer (no apologies), born in 1948, I hit college in 1966, Walpurgis Afternoon, as it were, on the 20th-century cultural calendar. I was greeted there by the first issue of the redesigned and recently radicalized BU News. The cover overhead: rotc vs. education, accompanied by a photo of a ROTC cadet printed as a negative image. The editorial: abolish rotc; page-one story: president case, houston condemn war, slums. The latter pieces quoted university president Harold C. Case saying the US is “more alone in the world than we know” thanks to the Johnson administration’s Vietnam policies, and cited student-body president Julian Houston (who became a respected Boston judge) calling for “a total re-evaluation of our educational purpose, and perhaps even a revolution.”
There was also an invitation to try out for the paper’s staff, codedly promising that “cool heads prevail” at the News . Needless to say, I headed straight to the BU News office and offered my services as a reporter and photographer, skills acquired in gentler times working on high-school publications.
There I met the strangest and most wonderful cast of characters I’d encountered in all my 18 years. Secular-humanist nerds on dope. Hyperventilating social activists. Blue-collar scholarship geniuses and eccentric millionaires’ children in mutually gratifying solidarity. Love at first sight. I became an overnight BU Newsnik, anxious to subvert and bedevil the university, its president, the government, the military, the church, and every other authority dedicated to holding back the flood of over-educated young people inadvertently created by America’s post-Sputnik frenzy to out-school the Russians.
I was not alone. My generation’s distinguishing shared experience was media; our common characteristic was a determination to do things our own way. Inspired by Elvis and Kerouac and Ed Murrow and Dylan and betrayed by the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam draft, we saw every advantage in re-invention and none in convention. And, thanks to the Cold War Space Race, the World War II establishment — the infamous hand that fed us — had given us the tools to re-work just about anything.
As budding know-it-all journalists, we threw out every playbook and rulebook in sight. One by one, we transferred out of the communication school that had admitted us and re-enrolled as English or poli-sci majors. We cozied up to progressive profs like Mad Murray Levin and Howard Zinn and made fun of the J-school instructors who limited the art of reporting to “who, what, where, and when.” We went straight to that most elusive “w” — why.
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In the darkroom, we pushed standard black-and-white film to wantonly high speeds with specialty developing concoctions so we could shoot everything with available light — imparting an atmospheric, realistic look to our pictures and abandoning the flat, grain-less, over-lit direct-flash intrusiveness of standard press photography.
When we wrote, we never took shelter behind traditional “objectivity.” We reported what we saw; we wrote what we saw was true. We embraced narrative journalism — specializing in long (and often long-winded) personalized accounts. We wrote about what we participated in and vice versa. Our heavily personalized and opinionated approach wasn’t really anything new. The tradition went back to when English-language journalism began, with the early, and unabashedly partisan, British broadsides. But it violated what, through the 1950s and early ’60s, were considered the pillars of the free press — party-line facts and no interpretation. We saw through those fair-sounding constraints as self-administered shackles through which the established interests were able to protect themselves from scrutiny and effectively manipulated the press.
In those days, in the dailies, inconvenient truths and unpleasant details didn’t have a chance. Neither did black activists, gays, feminists, free thinkers, pacifists, birth-control activists, political dissidents, Beat poets, Socialist Workers’ Party candidates, Lenny Bruce, or rock and roll. Media left a lot of stuff out.
And we were above all else media’s children. Our worldview and belief systems sprang from a lifetime of being bombarded by Howdy Doody, Davy Crockett, Little Richard, Walter Cronkite, live images of Lee Harvey Oswald dying in the Dallas cop-house garage, James Bond, Catcher in the Rye , accounts of the Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney murders, Gunsmoke , and Cold War scare tactics by which ’50s governments controlled their citizens.
As we grew up, we’d bought into it all. What we saw on TV and read in the papers was, we internalized early, the way things were. Then, as we plodded through high school, read Elie Wiesel’s Night , Camus, and e.e. cummings, many of us began to doubt. ( Mad magazine was no small influence here, as well.) The world according to CBS and the local daily ceased to align with what we were discovering about the world we were entering, uncensored, at recklessly high speed.
