One of the alternative press’s most significant scoops of the 1960s was Sol Stern’s February 1967 Ramparts magazine’s exposé revealing that the Central Intelligence Agency had long secretly funded and controlled the National Student Association (NSA). The story was significant because it revealed the NSA was a CIA front, but its greater significance came with the many derivative investigative journalistic pieces published in the months that followed. More

"These CIA operations were run by liberal anti-communists who were distrusted by conservative anti-communists like Joseph McCarthy; one reason these were covert operations was to avoid the scrutiny of congressional conservatives who would not have funded these programs. With most of these publications the CIA sought to strengthen the moderate left, bolstering liberal ideology as a way of keeping thinking people from pursuing socialism or communism. Often, the CIA’s covertly subsidized titles were works that would not have made it into print without these secret patrons. There is rich irony that the secret police of American capitalism had to covertly prop-up works that could not survive the free market that the Agency was fighting to protect."