CounterPunch Editor Dies
Alexander Cockburn, editor of the political newsletter CounterPunch, lost a two-year battle against cancer when he died in Germany on Friday night.
Alexander Cockburn, editor of the political newsletter CounterPunch, lost a two-year battle against cancer when he died in Germany on Friday night.
Jeffrey St. Clair, Cockburn’s co-editor, said farewell to him in a eulogy published on CounterPunch shortly after Cockburn’s death. St. Clair explained to surprised readers that Cockburn had kept his disease a secret out of a desire to live the end of his life as himself, rather than as a victim of cancer.
— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.
Dig, Root, GrowCounterPunch:
Alex kept his illness a tightly guarded secret. Only a handful of us knew how terribly sick he truly was. He didn’t want the disease to define him. He didn’t want his friends and readers to shower him with sympathy. He didn’t want to blog his own death as Christopher Hitchens had done. Alex wanted to keep living his life right to the end. He wanted to live on his terms. And he wanted to continue writing through it all, just as his brilliant father, the novelist and journalist Claud Cockburn had done. And so he did. His body was deteriorating, but his prose remained as sharp, lucid and deadly as ever.
This year, we’re all on shaky ground, and the need for independent journalism has never been greater. A new administration is openly attacking free press — and the stakes couldn’t be higher.
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Pull the Sandersmobile into the garage for inspection, pop the hood and you’ll soon discover the vacuous truth: no engine, just an exhaust pipe, pumping out rhetoric. So much talk, so little action. The deeper you look at Sanders, the less substance you see.
Mostly due to revenue from ads, the Web firm will rake in $60 billion this year, making it bigger than both the newspaper and magazine industries; the hypocrisy of British Prime Minister David Cameron announcing extended austerity from a golden throne sickened more than one; meanwhile, The New York Times is losing talent left and right. These discoveries and more after the jump.
CounterPunch, the muckraking political newsletter founded in 1994 by investigative journalist Jeffrey St. Clair and recently deceased iconoclast Alexander Cockburn, has paid a “savage price” for maintaining its deeply critical view of President Obama during the 2012 presidential campaign season.
Fashion, tips for surviving a police encounter, and why we might all be better off when the American empire crumbles are among the subjects the late CounterPunch editor Alexander Cockburn rapped about in a conversation in the Deep South sometime during the summer of 2006.
He could be infuriating in his lust for truth and social justice, but no serious student of our time can deny Alexander Cockburn’s importance as one of the most principled and insightful political journalists of the past half-century.
Two percent of the U.S. adult population in lockup; 600,000 “stop-and-frisks” in New York City; three-quarters of a million people booked as official sex offenders. Counterpunch editor Alexander Cockburn thinks it's time we revisit the notion of “fascism.”
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