ALEXANDER COCKBURN:

the alternative in the mainstream

• Friday, Burdine 106 (on UT campus), 6:30PM

Alexander Cockburn, dissident journalist and veteran radical, will talk about the situation we find ourselves in here in the United States. The popular consensus between media and the state has accelerated the drift toward authoritarianism on the home front. A mendacious and sophisticated landscape of propaganda enables new waves of imperial adventure in the Middle East and Africa. There are some voices of critical sanity fortunately, Cockburn one of the most angry among them.

In his three-decade career, Alexander Cockburn has been a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the Village Voice. He writes a syndicated column for mainstream newspapers and a bi-weekly column in The Nation magazine, and he churns out books for reputable publishers while writing pieces for dissident web sites as well as his own newsletter.

Though he is routinely described as an "alternative journalist," Cockburn also has been one of the few left/radicals who routinely publishes in mainstream venues. One never knows where his pieces will turn up - but one can know that wherever published, Cockburn is likely to piss off someone (most famously, some of his easily outraged liberal colleagues at The Nation).

In a world where journalists often make their careers by sucking up to the powerful, Cockburn has taken aim -- at both the powerful and the suck-up journalists. In a news media where the bland rule, Cockburn is relentlessly caustic. In other words, Cockburn -- alternative, mainstream or something in between -- is a real journalist, if we define a journalist as someone who is willing to dig beyond the surface and yet remain unconcerned about who is offended by what he finds.

These days, Cockburn is most widely recognized as co-editor, with Jeffrey St. Clair, of Counterpunch newsletter and its companion website, www.counterpunch.org. After 9/11, the Counterpunch site became one of a handful of key left/progressive sources on the web that people turned to for news and opinions regarding the so-called "war on terrorism." Critical analysis from journalists, political activists, and academics -- work that could never make it into the mainstream papers and journals - regularly appears on Cockburn and St. Clair's site.

In addition to the newspaper and web writing, Cockburn and St. Clair have written or edited a book a year for the past five: the soon-to-be-released Politics of Anti-Semitism (Everything You Wanted to Know About Anti-Semitism But Felt Too Guilty to Ask); Counterpunch: The Journalism That Rediscovers America; Five Days That Shook the World: The Battle for Seattle and Beyond; Al Gore: A User's Manual; and Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press.

Cockburn grew up in Ireland and was educated at Oxford. He was an editor at the Times Literary Supplement, and the New Statesman before becoming a permanent resident of the United States in 1973. He now lives in northern California.

-- Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream and co-author of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality. He writes regularly for mainstream and alternative publications (including the Counterpunch web site). His articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/freelance.htm.