A Truly Free Press: First Issue of I.F. Stone’s Weekly Published
Independent journalist I.F. Stone on this day published the first issue of his own newsletter, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, which became a model of a free press.
Relying entirely on public documents and statements, and willing to think critically about them, Stone exposed many government lies and much hypocrisy during the Cold War, the Vietnam War, as well as many other issues in between. The Weekly also carried no advertising and was therefore no subject to pressures from advertisers.
Unlike conventional Washington, DC, journalists, Stone did not rely on interviews with top government officials, a process that tends to blunt their critical perspective on officials who are their primary sources of information.Working alone, with his wife as his assistant, Stone published the Weekly from this day until December 1971.
Learn more at the I.F. Stone web site: http://www.ifstone.org/
Read: Robert Cottrell, Izzy: A Biography of I. F. Stone (1992)
Read all of I.F. Stone’s Weekly: http://www.unz.org/Pub/IFStonesWeekly-1953
Watch a documentary on I.F. Stone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foffdIPoswA
The “Sixties” really began in the mid-1950s and ended in the early 1970s. Read: Christopher B. Strain, The Long Sixties: America, 1955-1973 (2016)