Why the Mainstream Media Will Fail: Alexander Cockburn on Journalism in the U.S. (1987)

Alexander Cockburn moved to the United States in 1972 and once there set himself up as a journalist. He would become close friends with Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Israel Shahak, Andrew Kopkind, and Saul Landau, among others. Cockburn wrote for many publications, including The New York Review of Books, Esquire, and Harper's. From 1973 to 1983 he was a writer with The Village Voice, originating its longstanding "Press Clips" column, in his time there he interviewed Rupert Murdoch after a struggle over the ownership of The Voice culminated in Murdoch buying the paper. James Ridgeway later noted "Murdoch, when he owned the Voice, was said to gag on some of Alex's pointed epithets, but he never did anything about it. He actually had us both to lunch and offered us a column." Cockburn went on to write Idle Passion: Chess and the Dance of Death (1975) as a class history of chess, and a lot of "bogus Freudian stuff", as he would later put it, in a critical evaluation of the claims made for chess. In the late 1970s Cockburn and Ridgeway wrote Political Ecology in which they went through numerous areas of US domestic policy, whether it was housing or agriculture, critically examining each topic, making proposals to adjust policy. Cockburn was later suspended, as The Voice stated, for "accepting a $10,000 grant from an Arab studies organization in 1982".[10][11] His defenders charge that his criticism of Israeli government policies was behind the firing. In 1984 Cockburn found a regular position at The Nation with a column called "Beat the Devil" after the title of the novel written by his father. He went on to write columns for the New York Press, the LA Times, and the New Statesman. Cockburn was also a regular contributor to the Anderson Valley Advertiser and later The Week. He was not afraid to write for newspapers which took a conservative editorial standpoint, such as The Wall Street Journal for which Cockburn wrote for ten years, even becoming a columnist for Chronicles in 2009.[12] As an author of around twenty books, Cockburn produced work covering an array of different areas and with many fellow writers. In 1987 he completed what would be the first of a series of books composed of columns, diary entries, letters, and essays from 1976 over the preceding decade. It was called Corruptions of Empire (1988) and its cover featured a portrayal of Admiral George Cockburn torching the White House with slaves escaping.[13] To follow up Cockburn published The Golden Age Is In Us: Journeys and Encounters (1995) in the much the same mode combining diary entries with columns, essays, and letters even including hate mail. The last collection in this series was A Colossal Wreck: A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption, and American Culture (2013), which was published posthumously, having completed it shortly before his death.[14] Cockburn was a permanent resident of the United States since 1973 as an Irish citizen. He became a US citizen in 2009. He lived in New York City for many years, before moving to Petrolia in Humboldt County in northern California in 1992.