Content
Each installment of Alternative Views included a regular news section that utilized material from mostly non-mainstream news sources to provide stories ignored by establishment media, or interpretations of events different from the mainstream.
Alternative Views landed many significant interviews during its run, and it was often ahead of mainstream media in identifying major stories. Its first program featured an Iranian student who discussed opposition to the Shah of Iran and the possibility of his overthrow. It also had a detailed discussion of the Sandinista movement struggling to overthrow Anastasio Somoza. It would be several weeks before national broadcast media discovered these movements.
Early shows included long-form interviews with Senator Ralph Yarborough, a Texas progressive responsible for legislation like the National Defense Education Act, and former CIA officials like John Stockwell and Philip Agee, who both presented arguments for shuttering the CIA.
Other interviewees included:
Anti-war and anti-nuclear activists like Helen Caldicott, George Wald, Ramsey Clark, Daniel Ellsberg, Michael Klare, David Dellinger, and representatives of the European peace movement.
US New Left activists like David MacReynolds, Stokely Carmichael, Greg Calvert, and Dr. Benjamin Spock.
Feminists, gay activists, union activists, and representatives of local progressive groups appeared on the show; and officials from the Soviet Union, Nicaragua, Allende's former government in Chile, the democratic front in El Salvador, and many other Third World countries and revolutionary movements.
In addition, Alternative Views broadcast many documentaries, both self-produced and produced by others, and it screened raw video footage of the bombing of Lebanon and aftermath of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, of the assassinations of five communist labor organizers by the Ku Klux Klan in Greensboro, North Carolina, and of counterrevolutionary activity in Nicaragua.
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“Our frigate takes fire,
The other asks if we demand quarter?
If our colors are struck and the fighting done?
Now I laugh content for I hear the voice of my little captain,
We have not struck, he composedly cries, we have just begun our part of the fighting.”
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—G.C. (Georg Christoph)