Uncovering the sixties: the life and times of the underground press.

• Author: Bass, Paul

Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press.

Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press. Abe Peck. Pantheon, $12.95. It would be easy to dismiss the underground press corps of the sixties as a gang of wild-eyed journalistic guerrillas. Their war on "Amerika' left no time for such trivialities as fact-checking. Their weapons were New York Post-sized headlines that screamed "Heil Columbia' and "Pigs Shoot to Kill-- Bystanders Gunned Down.'

But for all their blemishes, papers like The Berkeley Barb and The East Village Other thrived as energetic, irreverent experiments that provided needed insight to millions of readers--and changed American journalism for the better. Their excesses and innovations are apparent in this entertaining new history written by an alumnus of chicago's underground Seed and now a more sedate journalism professor.

The author didn't neglect his research: he pored over microfilms of hundreds of old papers and interviewed almost a hundred writes and editors. But Peck emphasizes that this is history through his eyes. Uncovering the Sixties shifts easily from third-person narrative to personal recollection.

So did sixties underground journalism. At its heart, it was a revolt against the journalistic canon of objectivity, of pretending that your biases have no part in determining what stories you cover, whom you quote, or which facts you emphasize. Demonstrators covered the demonstrations; flower children had the drug beat.

Unmitigated bias can limit your audience, of course. As Peck notes, "Underground papers casually labeled tens of millions of Americans "pigs'.' The undergrounders didn't bother with presenting divergent views, confident that they knew so much about their subject that...