CounterPunch (newsletter)
From Free net encyclopedia
CounterPunch is a biweekly newsletter published in the United States that covers politics from a left-wing point of view. It has a popular website which contains much material not published in the newsletter.
The newsletter was established in 1994 by the Washington, D.C.-based investigative reporter Ken Silverstein. He was soon joined by the journalists Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. In 1996 Silverstein left the publication and Cockburn and St. Clair have since been co-editors.
Running six to eight pages in length, the CounterPunch newsletter primarily publishes commentaries by Cockburn and St. Clair with regular contributions by others. It is noted for its critical coverage of both Democratic and Republican politicians and its extensive reporting of environmental and trade union issues, American foreign policy, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. CounterPunch says it carrys on the tradition of muckraking journalism of earlier investigative journalists such as I.F. Stone and George Seldes, casting its approach as "muckraking with a radical attitude".
Since coming online in 1998, the CounterPunch website has become one of the most frequently-visited left-leaning sites on the Internet.[1] While offering much material not published in the newsletter, the latter continues to publish commentaries by St. Clair and Cockburn that are not published on the web. The website, which is updated on a daily basis, is supported by revenues generated by the newsletter, as well as fundraising activities and commissions received on click-through sales from Amazon.com.
Editorials on the website take standpoints on controversial issues. Critics of the publication, such as Eric Alterman [2], and Steven Plaut [3] and [4], have charged Cockburn and St. Clair with publishing anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-Semitic views. However, CounterPunch also publishes American, Jewish, and Israeli authors who do not accept those labels, prefering to identify themselves instead as anti-Zionists or critics of US foreign policy.
Contributors
Notable contributors to CounterPunch have included Robert Fisk, the late Edward Said, Tim Wise, Ralph Nader, M. Shahid Alam, Ward Churchill, Lila Rajiva, Tanya Reinhart, and Alexander Cockburn's two brothers, Andrew and Patrick, both of whom write on the Middle East, Iraq in particular. Some paleoconservative writers like Paul Craig Roberts and William Lind can also be found in CounterPunch. The site regularly publishes veteran radicals, such as Lenni Brenner, Fidel Castro, and the late Stew Albert, as well as younger authours such as Joshua Frank, whose writings appear to have been influenced by Cockburn.